Vodafone selects Huawei as OpenStack supplier

Vodafone has selected Huawei's OpenStack platform to transform business operations

Telecommunications firm Vodafone has selected mobile phone maker Huawei as an approved vendor to supply a range of OpenStack solutions.

The Chinese technology company will provide Vodafone with its FusionSphere OpenStack platform to support the firm's rollout of Network Functions Virtualization and Software Defined Network technologies.

Vodafone is looking to integrate SDN and NFV solutions across its business departments as part of plans to drive operational transformation.

The firm said it wants to increase agility, consistency and efficiency across its businesses over the next few years, and Huawei's OpenStack platform will help it achieve this.

Fran Heeran, head of network virtualisation, said: "We are delighted to add Huawei as a supplier for our network transformation programme.

"Openness and standards are key to our future strategy and OpenStack is an important element of our transformation program.

"We look forward to working with Huawei to accelerate the deployment of virtualized resources and services."

The FusionSphere operating system is an important part of Huawei's cloud strategy, offering typical OpenStack interfaces, community-enhanced features and access to third-party virtual networks.

With the platform, companies can simplify and speed up network deployments, and it's already being used across a range of private and public clouds.

Huawei said the platform is part of 400 projects worldwide, letting companies build "open, agile, and highly reliable cloud data centers".

Zheng Yelai, president of Huawei Cloud BU and Huawei IT Product Line, believes that its technology will play a critical part in Vodafone's business transformation plans over the next few years.

"We are delighted to be selected to participate in such an ambitious transformation programme at Vodafone," he said.

"Huawei is committed to open standards and customer centricity and will continue to increase its investments in OpenStack development and contributions back to the open source community.

"Huawei is providing Vodafone with the key technologies to become future-ready in network capabilities and to embrace all that digital business has to offer."

Ann Hatchell, head of network marketing at Amdocs, said this technology will play a key role in business transformation in the foreseeable future.

"NFV will underpin new use cases, services and business models that will differentiate operators in this new landscape of not only competing operators but also OTT web scale players," she said.

"It will highlight the need for closed-loop operations to deliver on the promise of NFV - more service agility, reduced manual processes with automation and orchestration, intelligence to enable predictive assurance, and faster time to innovation."