Now that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has elected to primarily use Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) for its cloud-focused 5G core products, we at Silverlinings wondered how long it would take for operators to migrate from Nokia's platform to Red Hat.
So, being curious muppets, we asked.
“[Nokia Container Services] and [CloudBand Infrastructure Software] will continue to be shipped and delivered by Nokia in line with customer contracts and product lifecycle,” Darrell Jordan-Smith, Red Hat's SVP of Telco Media Entertainment and Edge, told us via email. “Red Hat-Nokia will provide customers with the option to migrate to Red Hat OpenStack Platform and/or Red Hat OpenShift at a timeline that makes sense for them.”
But which operators might move to Red Hat first? “We cannot name specific customers,” Jordan-Smith said. Alrighty then!
Roy Chua, founder and principal at AvidThink, however, had thoughts on the first migration candidates, while noting that neither Nokia or Red Hat had shared any names yet.
“I know Airtel has both Nokia CBIS and Red Hat relationships already in place (as I'm sure many of the other CBIS installations out there), so operators like them that have dual vendor relationships could be in a better spot for migration,” he wrote.
Migration from Nokia platforms to the Red Hat “will likely be a 6-12 month migration process once the telco operator decides to do it,” Chua added. “There's a lot of similarity in the underlying base software so recertification or re-testing of the [cloud native functions] and [Virtual network functions] on RH OpenStack/OpenShift should not take too long.”
Thus, we could start to hear of operators starting the shift to Red Hat sometime late in 2023 and into 2024.