Sees the OpenStack platform for telcos as equivalent of enterprise virtualisation, but without the lock-in Red Hat – set to be a $2bn business soon, and still growing at around 20% a year is drawing up its list of targets for sales in Europe this year, and it looks like telecomms companies are top of its list.
EMEA GM Werner Knoblich (below) talked to IT Europa this week “There is a telco push this year – we are recognising the potential in the market, and the move to using OpenStack. The telcos want a system that can cope with moving resources around their networks – similar to enterprise use of virtualisation, but able to cope with changing workloads,” he says.
OpenStack is the Open Source Cloud computing platform aimed at public and private clouds, and backed by the likes of Red Hat, HPE, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Dell, EMC, NetApp.......
“We see OpenStack for telcos in the same way as we saw Linux for financial services in the late '90s – the investment banks made Linux mainstream; it was all about trading platforms, and they just got faster speeds and lower latency with it. Linux became accepted in the enterprise not because of cost, but functionality. They legitimised it and we can see the telco industry doing the same for OpenStack.”
The telcos as an industry seems to have decided that OpenStack will be the technology to virtualise the networks, he says. And it is a huge business with even bigger potential. So far Red Hat has sold just to the IT departments of telcos but, on average,10% of telco technology spend is on IT and 90% in the network area.
Telcos are looking to roll out services on their networks so they must have the management and flexibility; telcos today are all about appliances, running dedicated software from the NEPs, he explains. This means dedicated systems, and potential lock-in. So as bandwidth use rises, they need to be able to move resources around to match traffic.
“It is like what VMware did, abstracting hardware from software; this gives much higher utilisation and this is fundamentally what they are doing – everything becomes software defined and become a VNF – virtual network function, which become software appliances, sitting on a neutral platform. They want to mix and match applications from the other vendors and today this is almost impossible.”
They see Red Hat as in a strong position, he says “We are independent and neutral – we don't have any hardware and there's no lock-in, and that is why there is now a big drive for this. From an OpenStack perspective in Red Hat, telco is a really important market – we have reorganised and from March 1 will have a dedicated force in EMEA.”
This is not just in go-to-market and sales, but on the product side he has dedicated engineering teams, and is advancing the telco requirement upstream. “We don't want to create a version of OpenStack for them – like the carriers wanted their own version of Linux and we resisted that. This is important – they don't need a carrier grade OpenStack – they need an OpenStack that is carrier grade. It is a subtle difference. We ensure they get advances and perhaps telco-specific features earlier but it is not a different product. This then goes into the mainstream product.”
OpenStack is the plumbing but even hotter is the overall digitalisation and the differentiation of products which comes from software – it is the communication and integration platform for the future. Openstack is so popular with vendors because nobody wanted to see the repeat in cloud of what happened in virtualisation where VMware became a dominant player. IBM, Intel, HP, Cisco, etc all support OpenStack for this reason, and are investing millions of dollars in its development.
The platform now has huge resources behind it. And now that VMware has released its own version of OpenStack, this is a key indicator. Other heavy users such as banks are also backing OpenStack but it is not yet a product for the rest of the market, he thinks “This will take some time. The big guys will make it happen first.”
But there is a problem with finding enough skills to work with the platform. OpenStack skills are not so much a matter for partners yet so much as for the individuals with the knowledge. “OpenStack, like any new sophisticated technology is seeing a skills shortage. That is why we doing a lot on training – we are known for the excellence of our online education and we have increased it further to make it easier to consume in smaller chunks.”
Some partners have seen the trend and have committed to it and getting trained up; they find they can charge higher rates and there is a lot happening on the skills development, especially among the integrators who are interested in selling those capabilities onwards.