Biot, France, September 9, 2024 – We are excited to announce that Red Hat has joined the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance (OSA) as a Strategic Member. This collaboration marks a significant milestone for our community, as Red Hat brings its extensive expertise in open-source cloud-native solutions to the OAI codebase. Together, we look forward to driving innovation and advancing the development of open-source 5G and the next generation, strengthening our commitment to create an open and collaborative future for wireless technologies.

OSA and Red Hat have worked together since 2017. The seven-year-old relationship started with Red Hat joining OSA as an Associate Member to introduce cloud-native principles in the OAI codebase. Today, OAI developers and CI/CD pipelines extensively use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes. Since then, both organizations have participated in multiple public events to demonstrate various open-source cloud-native 5G deployments.

The collaboration focuses on enhancing the cloud-native capabilities of the OAI RAN and Core Network. It involves exposing application-level metrics to enable detailed monitoring and implementing closed-loop management of network functions through Operator intelligence. Additionally, efforts are directed towards validating best practices by certifying OAI RAN and Core Network OCI images and operators. Lastly, we will establish a dedicated lab environment for testing RAN and Core Network Functions (NFs) on various RHEL and OpenShift versions.

Hanen Garcia, global telco solutions manager, Red Hat
“Joining the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance as a strategic member reflects Red Hat’s deep commitment to advancing open-source innovation for enterprises and the telecommunications industry. With our expertise in cloud-native innovation, we’re eager to collaborate on evolving RAN and Core Networks. This collaboration allows us to drive the development of software-defined, open, and interoperable solutions that can help revolutionize telco infrastructure, making it more agile, scalable, and aligned with open-source values.”

Irfan Ghauri, director of operations, OpenAirInterface
“The history of collaboration between Red Hat and OSA is long and rich. We joined forces several years ago with Red Hat and other partners in showcasing the Telco Virtual Central Office (VCO) within the OPNFV activities concerning the Linux Foundation. We showcased this work at KubeCon and other important events as early as 2020. We then started working together on deploying OAI CU/DU on Red Hat OpenShift, which is work that the community greatly benefits from. We are very enthusiastic about Red Hat joining OSA and look forward to working together on the evolution towards 6G and next-generation topics.”

About OpenAirInterface Software Alliance (OSA): The OSA was founded in 2014 by EURECOM, a research institute in the South of France. The Alliance manages and promotes OpenAirInterface (OAI) open-source software that offers 4G and 5G and Core Network stacks. Many organizations worldwide use the OAI software for research, testing, and building blocks of systems for different 4G/5G use cases, a growing number of which are industrial. Today, AMD, Canonical, Ericsson, Firecell, Fujitsu, InterDigital, NI, Nokia Bell Labs, NVIDIA, Orange, PAWR, Qualcomm, Red Hat, Sequans Communications, VIAVI, and Vodafone are on the Board of Directors of the OSA as Strategic Members. Visit us at https://openairinterface.org.

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