Orange consolidates on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for flexibility and innovation at scale
BARCELONA, Spain - MWC BARCELONA, March 03, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and Orange, one of the world’s leading telco operators and digital service providers, today announced a collaboration to provide the underlying common telco cloud foundation for Orange International Networks, unifying its containerized and virtual network functions with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Orange started its international networks transformation journey eight years ago. Early on, it adopted a network softwarization strategy relying on virtualization of network functions to enable greater flexibility, cost efficiency and sovereignty over its networks and services deployments. More than 30 telco functions from 12 vendors were virtualized, including software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), voice, content delivery network (CDN) and roaming. Building a telco cloud infrastructure was the cornerstone of this approach, with a footprint large enough to be less than 10 milliseconds away from any business-to-business (B2B) or wholesale customer.
To accelerate its cloud transformation and services softwarization, Orange has chosen to transition its services to a cloud-native infrastructure based on Red Hat platforms. This deployment leverages Red Hat OpenShift as a foundation for cloud-native network functions, incorporating Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to enhance Orange’s existing expertise in virtualized workloads. Additionally, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform will enable fully automated deployment and scaling across its infrastructure. Together, Red Hat and Orange are advancing a vendor-agnostic cloud-native and automation framework for Orange’s international common telco cloud infrastructure, strengthening network services softwarization and industrialization.
The new platform will host a variety of use cases, ranging from SD-WAN and SASE gateway, to IMS, 4G and 5G core, IoT and roaming services. So far Orange has successfully deployed six new points of presence (PoPs) to run live on the platform.
This collaboration with Red Hat enables Orange to be more agile as a business to respond faster to customer needs and market opportunities. Benefits of the new platform include:
Greater availabilityand operational efficiency, with improved lifecycle management and easier upgrade process with near-zero downtime;
Flexibility, scalability and future-readiness thanks to a common platform that can host both virtualized and containerized workloads in a consistent way on any environment;
Faster time to market via fully automated deployment and scaling and zero-touch provisioning. Outcomes include reducing the risk of human error and four times faster deployment times for a service;
Improved resilience with infrastructure as code (IaC), which enables version control, enhances change management and allows quick redeployment of clusters and network functions in case of failure;
Improved security capability, making use of built-in features including network and container isolation and controlled access to applications; and
Reduced carbon footprint due to an optimized hardware setup.
Orange is on track to increase its common telco cloud infrastructure based on Red Hat OpenShift in the next two years across the globe to 75 telco cloud PoPs, migrating from its existing 50 OpenStack platforms and deploying 25 new PoPs. Helping to meet its sustainability goals, Orange will be able to reuse existing equipment and take advantage of power monitoring capabilities in Red Hat OpenShift to reduce carbon footprint.
Supporting Quotes
Fran Heeran, vice president, Global Telecommunications, Red Hat "The Orange and Red Hat teams have built a close collaboration over the years based on transparency and simplicity. We’re delighted to see Orange unlocking significant benefits in stability, resilience and time to market with the use of Red Hat technologies. Orange is a best-practice example of harnessing end-to-end automation and cloud-native orchestration to target large scale deployments and workload migration to modern infrastructure with the help of Red Hat."
Jean Louis Le Roux, executive vice president, International Networks, Orange, and chief technology and information officer, Orange Wholesale "We’ve been collaborating with Red Hat in recent years on our extensive and successful network softwarization strategy, achieving flexibility and programmability objectives for services provided to large business and wholesale customers. We have recently selected Red Hat OpenShift for our next generation of telco cloud, and our move to containerization. We are very happy with the first deployments and are moving forward to cover the globe with this new technology. We are ready to host advanced telco services, such as SD-WAN, IoT, voice and mobile core within 10 milliseconds of any customer."
Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future.
Forward-Looking Statements
Except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are based on the company’s current assumptions regarding future business and financial performance. These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statement in this press release speaks only as of the date on which it is made. Except as required by law, the company assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.
About Orange
Orange is one of the world’s leading telecommunications operators with revenues of 40.3 billion euros in 2024 and 127,000 employees worldwide at 31 December 2024, including 71,000 employees in France. The Group has a total customer base of 291 million customers worldwide at 31 December 2024, including 253 million mobile customers and 22 million fixed broadband customers. These figures account for the deconsolidation of certain activities in Spain following the creation of MASORANGE. The Group is present in 26 countries (including non-consolidated countries).
Orange is also a leading provider of global IT and telecommunication services to multinational companies under the brand Orange Business. In February 2023, the Group presented its strategic plan "Lead the Future", built on a new business model and guided by responsibility and efficiency. "Lead the Future" capitalizes on network excellence to reinforce Orange's leadership in service quality.
Orange is listed on Euronext Paris (symbol ORA).
For more information on the internet and on your mobile: www.orange.com, www.orange-business.com and the Orange News app or to follow us on X: @orangegrouppr.
Red Hat, Ansible, and OpenShift are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. The OPENSTACK logo and word mark are trademarks or registered trademarks of OpenInfra Foundation, used under license. Red Hat is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation, or the OpenStack community.
Orange and any other Orange product or service names included in this material are trademarks of Orange or Orange Brand Services Limited.
