• TelecomTV recently conducted its second Cloud-Native Telco Market Perception Survey
• We asked network operators which vendors they regard as the cloud-native telco sector leaders
• Red Hat once again took the crown, followed closely by AWS, with Wind River attracting much more support to rank third

Red Hat is once again the company most widely regarded as a cloud-native telco market leader by network operator executives, according to the results of a survey conducted by TelecomTV that have just been published in our second Cloud-Native Telco Market Perception Report.

We asked executives from a broad range of operators to participate in our second Cloud-Native Telco Market Perception study (the first was in September 2023), and received responses from 35 individuals representing more than 20 (mostly Tier 1) network operators from North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. The job titles of the respondents ranged from CTO/CTIO and chief telco cloud executives to multiple group technology VPs, operations managers, network planners and more. 

We asked a range of questions about cloud-native telco progress and about which companies are perceived to be the sector’s leading technology suppliers. Specifically, we asked: Which of the following technology suppliers/vendors do you regard as cloud-native telco sector leaders?  

We provided a lengthy list of options and our respondents could select as many as they deemed appropriate – they were also able to suggest others they regard as cloud-native tech/platform pioneers. 

As you can see from the chart above, only three companies managed to attract votes from the majority of our respondents, with IBM-owned Red Hat (69%) taking the gold medal position, closely followed by Amazon Web Services (66%) for the silver and Wind River (51%) picking up the bronze.

For the top two, that’s a repeat of the September 2023 perception survey results, as Red Hat and AWS landed the gold and silver medal positions then too, but in late 2023 Wind River only attracted support from 33% of the telco respondents, so it has clearly made an impact in cloud-native telco circles in the past 20 months, rising from equal seventh place in 2023 to third in the ranking in 2025. 

Mavenir and Rakuten Symphony shared fourth position this time around, both attracting votes from 43% of our telco respondents. That’s a gain for both of those companies too, particularly Symphony: In our late 2023 survey, Mavenir came sixth with 37% and Rakuten Symphony came 11th with 20%. 

This time around Google attracted votes from 40% of our respondents to take sixth position (down from equal fourth last time, when it attracted votes from 50% of respondents). 

Many other vendors received various levels of support from the network operator community – you can see the full list by downloading (for free!) the full 13-page Cloud-Native Telco Market Perception Report.

We also asked our respondents whether telcos need specialist in-house cloud-native teams, posed questions about the readiness of telcos and vendors for the cloud-native era, and sought opinions on which network operators are regarded as cloud-native telco pioneers.

For the full list of our free-to-download DSP Leaders reports, check out the TelecomTV reports section. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV