It was Mark Twain who, upon reading his own obituary in a US newspaper, told a reporter that, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." In this interview Timo Jokiaho channels his inner Samuel L Clemens to explain that the persistent summer-long industry-wide rumours about Red Hat dropping its commitments to OpenStack were completely false.

He points out that Red Hat has invested heavily in OpenStack since the very inception of NFV, has numerous deployments of it around the global and will continue to support it and invest in it. Red Hat's current road map runs through to 2027 and Timo Jokiaho says the company remains totally committed to OpenStack and that commitment will not change throughout that entire period at the very least. That's clear and straightforward enough then.

For his part, Mark Longwell comments that OpenStack has now developed to become a mature and first class platform and the development plan for the OpenStack partner ecosystem is to ensure their software runs particularly well on Red Hat OpenStack and get full certification for Independent Software Vendor (ISV) for VNF to be officially recognised and confirmed on top of Red Hat OpenStack platforms so customers can deploy software with confidence. He adds that Red Hat now has 96 VNF certifications on top of OpenStack and 195 ISV apps totally certified for OpenStack.

Meanwhile, OpenShift is Red Hat's kubernetes container platform which runs perfectly well with OpenStack as well as on Amazon, Google and Microsoft cloud as well as many others.

As for OpenStack use cases, the list is as long as it is impressive, and includes instances of NFVi, AI, ML and data analytics, state and local governments, call centre providers and, of course, large CSPs such as AT&T, Verizon and many other household names. When OpenShift first hit the market it was focused on enterprises but with service provider and virtual network function partners now migrating to containers and OpenShift the ecosystem is thriving and continuing to grow.

Turning to 5G standardisation, Timo Jokiaho says that it has taken a completely different route to that of 4G. 5G standardisation implementation techniques such as containers and cloud native and so Red Hat decided the company would be ready for when the first 5G networks were under construction, and it is.

Featuring:
Timo Jokiaho Global Lead, Telco Partner Technology Development, Red Hat 
Mark Longwell, Director, Openstack Partner Ecosystem, Red Hat

Filmed at SDN NFV World Congress, The Hague, 2019