With Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, T-Mobile will leverage Red Hat’s industry leading, flexible and scalable platform that fosters innovation by delivering streamlined operations, enhanced automation, reduced costs and an accelerated time-to-market for new applications and services.

For telecommunications service providers, the demand for cloud flexibility is on the rise and cutting costs is vital for unlocking funds to support new investments.

This requires strategic enhancement of efficiencies and productivity through software innovation.

By implementing Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, T-Mobile can deploy a common telco cloud that helps address these challenges by:

• Keeping costs low by consolidating and standardising infrastructure across various workloads, including end-to-end automation for greater operational efficiency;
• Standardised training, support, compliance and security capabilities across all stacks to help reduce risk and complexity in managing diverse telecom workloads;
• Accelerated time-to-market with simple certification, pre-validation and lifecycle management processes including integration of VNFs, CNFs and IT applications;
• Scalability and flexibility in hybrid multi-cloud environments for enablement of more reliable, carrier-grade services to meet telecommunication service provider’s needs.

Meeting customers where they are with the Red Hat partner ecosystem

Working with Red Hat means telecommunication service providers can more easily interact with an array of open source technologies and communities, including a direct pipeline for requests and feedback upstream.

Deploying a common telco cloud also brings together a robust partner ecosystem in a unified, standards-based environment for more efficient development, testing and deployment.

It fosters collaboration and innovation by simplifying workload integration and speeding up certification processes, while expanding market opportunities and enabling more seamless alignment with telecom operators’ requirements.

With Red Hat and other key partners, T-Mobile and other wireless service providers will be able to more quickly deploy new services enabled on a pre-integrated and validated partner workload with a common telco cloud. 

Fran Heeran, vice president, Global Telecommunications, Red Hat, said:

“As telecommunications service providers face increasing demands for cloud flexibility, consistency and cost optimisation, Red Hat OpenShift provides a standardised, scalable foundation to drive efficiency and innovation. By collaborating with T-Mobile to power its common telco cloud, Red Hat will help unlock new opportunities for streamlined operations, faster service delivery and a simplified approach to managing diverse workloads across the core network. Together, we’re enabling a flexible, carrier-grade platform that not only meets today’s needs but lays the groundwork for tomorrow’s advancements.”

Lori Ames, senior vice president, Cloud, IP & Transport Technology, T-Mobile, said:

“T-Mobile’s multipurpose cloud will bridge us from a traditional telco to a dynamic techco, exposing previously untapped innovation while enhancing operational efficiencies. By partnering with best-in-class providers like Red Hat to  leverage cloud-native agility, automation and AI-driven insights, we’re redefining connectivity for the digital economy by meeting our customers where they need us.”

With this collaboration, Red Hat and SoftBank are addressing many of the long-standing RAN implementation challenges that service providers often face, such as balancing user demands with energy costs, resource availability and managing deterministic and distributed workloads.

By bringing together AI and RAN on a common platform, Red Hat OpenShift, service providers can dynamically adjust network parameters to meet changing demand and streamline network operations for higher agility.

SoftBank is working with Red Hat to develop AITRAS – an integrated AI and RAN solution built on Red Hat OpenShift.

AITRAS provides an enhanced network orchestration and optimisation solution that can support virtualised RAN and AI-enabled applications alike, enabling service providers to operate diverse applications with greater consistency and flexibility.

Additionally, SoftBank is working with Red Hat to use community-driven technologies, like Kepler, an open source project founded by Red Hat, to help service providers reduce energy costs by more accurately capturing and acting upon power-use metrics from applications.

The power monitoring capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift are derived from Kepler, which exposes key metrics at the cluster level to probe key performance counters and other system statistics.

These metrics can then be fed into SoftBank’s AITRAS orchestrator to help even out power consumption across disparate sites and optimise energy.

Using Red Hat OpenShift and its power monitoring capabilities, AITRAS can help service providers to:

• Optimise the placement of compute- and GPU-intensive workloads according to power consumption metrics to maximise energy usage across disparate environments, while still maintaining enhanced performance.

• Enable lightweight measuring using Red Hat OpenShift and Kepler, via extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) for kernel-level data collection, to help reduce overhead and improve energy efficiency.

• Achieve more precise GPU energy calculations for both Linux processes and Kubernetes pods using enhanced observability capabilities with Red Hat OpenShift and Kepler, enabling service providers to pinpoint granularities across multi-instance GPU (MIG) and various GPU devices.
To learn more about SoftBank’s AI-RAN solution on Red Hat OpenShift and the benefits of Kepler, visit Red Hat at MWC Barcelona 2025 (booth 2F30) for a demonstration.

Commenting, Chris Wright, chief technology officer and senior vice president, Global Engineering, Red Hat, said,

“Red Hat and SoftBank are committed to supporting the future of 5G and 6G use cases by bringing the combined power of AI and RAN to network orchestration and optimisation. With Red Hat OpenShift as a common platform, AI-RAN offers a pioneering approach to network operations for service providers to harness AI for improved resource efficiency and more sustainable power consumption, as well as supporting AI-enabled workloads across network environments.”

Ryuji Wakikawa, vice president, Head of the Research Institute of Advanced Technology, SoftBank Corp., also said:

“Electricity and telecommunications services continue to grow as critical infrastructure that supports society. By monitoring and predicting power consumption, ‘AITRAS’ optimises equipment from an energy efficiency perspective while reducing risks through distributed deployment. The integration of telecommunications and power infrastructure paves the way for the future of AI-driven infrastructure.”

 The availability of cloud credits for third-party purchases through the hyperscalers’ marketplaces and the emergence of new digital-first buyers are reshaping enterprise customer procurement behavior, vendor sales strategies and channel models.

While most vendor sales via these marketplaces are today “direct” to end customers, channel partners are playing an increasingly important role. By 2027, Canalys expects more than 50% of marketplace sales to flow through the channel.

This trend is explored in a new Canalys research report: Now and next for hyperscaler marketplaces.

Enterprise customers have committed to spend over US$360 billion on the top three hyperscalers’ cloud services on a multi-year basis.

Spend is shifting to the hyperscalers’ marketplaces as customers seek to burn down a portion of their cloud credits on third-party software and SaaS.

AWS Marketplace remains the clear leader in terms of sales volume, but Microsoft and Google Cloud are focused on closing the gap.

With enterprises facing IT budget pressure, the opportunity to use pre-approved cloud budgets to source a wide array of software and cybersecurity products while taking advantage of simplified billing and consolidated purchasing can be highly compelling.

This is tempting vendors from across the technology spectrum to sell through the hyperscalers’ marketplaces. CrowdStrike and Snowflake were among the first to publicly claim US$1 billion of total cumulative sales through marketplaces, and a host of the largest software and cybersecurity vendors are actively embracing this route to market.

Cisco, Citrix, IBM, NetApp, Nutanix, Red Hat, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Zoom are just some of the vendors that have launched or grown their sales on the hyperscalers’ marketplaces so far in 2024.

At the same time, many smaller “digital native” ISVs built on one of the three top hyperscalers’ cloud platforms are using their respective marketplaces as their primary routes to market.

The hyperscalers meanwhile are funneling substantial investments into marketplace co-sell resources, demand generation, sales incentives and channel programs (along with cuts to marketplace fees) to attract vendors to their cloud platforms.

The channel is becoming a focal point in the battle between the hyperscalers as vendors prioritize partner-first marketplace strategies.

Through models such as AWS’ Channel Partner Private Offers, Microsoft’s Multiparty Private Offers and Google Cloud’s newly launched Marketplace Channel Private Offers, vendors can enable their partners to create customized offers for their customers on the hyperscalers’ marketplaces while seeking to maintain margins for the channel.

“The channel has concerns about the rise of marketplaces, but both hyperscalers and vendors acknowledge the vital role of channel partners in driving customer adoption and growth,” said Alastair Edwards, chief analyst at Canalys. “Customers often prefer buying through trusted partners for help with managing cloud commitments and accessing professional services and technical expertise when sourcing complex technologies from multiple marketplaces.”

IT distributors are facing increasing competition from hyperscaler marketplaces that are themselves acting as digital distribution platforms.

Yet distributors will be important to reduce operational challenges for partners and vendors as adoption grows globally and to support the growing number of second-tier partners whose customers want to buy this way.

Canalys expects the development and expansion of new programs, such as AWS DSOR, to support greater distributor involvement.

Channel partners are vital to ensure customers can access the technologies they need, regardless of their buying preferences.

“A seamless buying experience is essential, and success will depend on greater API-led integration between hyperscalers, distributors and partner platforms,” said Edwards.

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The growth of the cloud computing market and increased availability of IT and managed services means Nigerian enterprises and institutions are investing in infrastructure and business digitalisation.

According to the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS), Nigeria’s ICT sector contributed 19.54% of the country’s GDP in Q2 2023 and has enjoyed a year-on-year growth rate of 8.6%.

We were also the leading destination for African tech startup funding in 2022. According to the African Tech Startups Funding Report, 180 Nigerian startups raised a combined $976 million, representing 29.3% of the continent’s total funding.

At the same time, many enterprises are working to refresh their existing infrastructure and applications.

After all, modernisation leads to the adoption of novel technologies and opens the door to new possibilities.

But, with modernisation comes a shift away from traditional IT systems and models, for instance, moving from a monolithic architecture to microservices.

It’s an existential shift and may be daunting, but it revolutionises how enterprises, including banks and financial service providers, approach application development and lets them leverage the full potential of the cloud.

The traditional approach

The basic premise of monolithic architecture is that it is designed to be self-contained. All components and functions are tightly coupled, meaning they must all be present for code to be executed and software to run. This proved appropriate when, at the dawn of the computer age, technical limitations meant software was written in low-level languages and ran on a single machine.

This kind of design does have its advantages. For one, monolithic software has better throughput than modular applications. It’s more straightforward to develop during the early stages of its lifecycle; can be easily deployed by copying the packaged application to another server; and, thanks to a single codebase, is simpler to configure, manage, and monitor for application performance.

Monolithic architecture is optimal when enterprise applications are simple and lightweight. However, today’s applications can be far more complex and have multiple functions with frequent code changes. Not to mention, people and businesses are using them more than ever before, which impacts their scalability requirements.

Breaking things down

The shift away from monolithic architecture is best exemplified by high-profile cases and a change in global digital trends. For instance, as it transitioned away from being a DVD renting service to a digital content streaming service, Netflix migrated its IT infrastructure and replaced monolithic architecture with microservices hosted on the public cloud. Given the number of subscribers it now enjoys, Netflix’s digital platform needs to be both highly efficient and scalable.

Microservices architecture entails splitting an application into specific services, each running a unique process and usually managing its own database.

They are often decentralised and have few dependencies, using application programming interfaces (APIs) and API gateways to communicate.

This enables developers and operation teams to work in tandem and not compromise the work of the other, which means improved development and turnaround times.

A major benefit of microservices is the ability to isolate faults. If a service suffers a problem, it can be isolated, tested, and redeployed without affecting the rest of the application. Microservices architecture also represents a cloud-native approach to building software.

Thanks to Nigeria’s growing cloud computing market, enterprises can access new digital capabilities.

Microservices in banking

Modular application development offers many benefits for Nigerian businesses. Shortened development cycles mean you can deploy and update your applications more quickly.

They can be scaled according to the size and needs of your organisation, and independent services do not impact one another in the event of faults, thus increasing your application’s resiliency.

These benefits extend across business sectors, particularly when it comes to those providing essential public and corporate services.

For example, let’s say a bank or financial service provider wants to modernise its IT system. While legacy banking systems serve an important purpose, many of them weren’t designed for the digital and data demands of today’s market and users. For example, Africa is set to be the fastest growing fintech region in the world, with a projected market value of $65 billion by 2030.

A company-wide transition to microservices enables the bank to accelerate integration with third parties, all while minimising risk to their active operations.

This is very relevant to Nigeria as we lead the rest of the continent in open banking. Earlier this year, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) approved regulations and guidelines for open banking regulations for banks to share customer data with third-party financial institutions via APIs.

Banks can introduce and offer new features to their customers, implement simpler versions of existing features, and make changes to them more efficiently.

Microservices offer a lot of advantages, but not every organisation is ready for or suited to this approach to architecture.

Organisations should engage their enterprise IT vendors to determine the best setup to meet their business and digital needs.

By laying the proper foundations, Nigeria’s institutions can stand the test of time and thrive in a digital-first future.

Helping the company to drive business transformation at scale to meet customer demand, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a more flexible and consistent foundation for security-enhanced hybrid cloud deployments.

The platform enables Salesforce to free up valuable developer resources while at the same time consolidating IT systems, all helping to generate better business outcomes for customers.

Salesforce is a customer-centric, innovation-driven provider of cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) systems, using a software-as-service model to support a robust customer base.

Over the years, Salesforce has continued to grow and evolve its offerings to incorporate breakthrough technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), automated self-service tools and real-time data insights to support customer business needs.

In doing so, Salesforce relies on a massive IT footprint that spans hundreds of thousands of systems running in traditional datacenter environments and in Hyperforce, Salesforce’s platform architecture designed for the public cloud.

The company’s rapid growth and innovation adoption also led to a heterogeneous operating system environment, including CentOS Linux 7, which required additional maintenance and management from Salesforce’s skilled infrastructure teams.

Now, Salesforce is standardising the full scope of its hybrid cloud infrastructure on the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

With this migration, Salesforce intends to gain even more efficiency in its IT operations, enhancing developer productivity and fuelling greater innovation across the customer experience.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers the necessary stability for modern IT workloads and enterprise-grade hybrid cloud deployments, enabling organisations to run applications anywhere while providing ease of management across on-premises and cloud environments.

By migrating its global infrastructure from CentOS Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Salesforce seeks to realise key benefits such as:

Optimised performance and efficiency across various hardware and software architectures, including ARM, which enables Salesforce engineering teams to more easily adopt breakthrough technologies without incurring new infrastructure demands.

Meeting customers where they are with a hardened platform that can drive more consistent innovation across the hybrid cloud, from the datacenter to public clouds to the edge, with the capacity to support unique customer use cases regardless of location or scale.

Improved system security measures with Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s layered approach to IT environment security, including support for many of the latest cryptographic and secure computing innovations.

Enhanced customer support experiences through Red Hat’s award-winning support team, enabling Salesforce engineering to focus on delivering customer value without being bogged down in the minutiae of managing an operating system at cloud-scale.

Salesforce has a longstanding history of collaboration with Red Hat and IBM Consulting to support customers with reliable cloud infrastructure and architecture for optimised CRM performance.

With today’s announcement, Salesforce is expanding upon relationships with Red Hat and IBM to modernise its cloud infrastructure for evolving customer needs.

Matt Hicks, president and chief executive officer, Red Hat, has this to say:

“As pioneers and leaders in our respective fields, Red Hat and Salesforce have a deep understanding and appreciation for constant transformation and relentless innovation in driving improved customer success. This collaboration highlights this shared commitment, as Salesforce can remain laser-focused on the customer experience, while Red Hat brings its decades of expertise in enterprise open source technologies and hybrid cloud infrastructure in support of their efforts to address dynamic customer needs.”

Also commenting, Srini Tallapragada, president and chief engineering officer, Salesforce, said:

“Customer centricity lies at the heart of everything we do. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, our global IT operations will innovate faster than ever to deliver the reliable, scalable experiences our customers demand.”

Cloud computing has revolutionized the IT industry over the past decade, enabling businesses to outsource many of their IT functions to remote servers, reduce operational costs, improve efficiencies, and enhance flexibility. While the private sector has been quick to adopt cloud-based solutions, the public sector has been slower in its uptake.

However, this trend is slowly changing as more and more governments and public institutions in the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) region are embracing cloud services to drive innovation, streamline operations, and achieve cost savings.

Traditional on-premise IT systems are expensive to acquire, install, and maintain, and require significant IT personnel resources to operate effectively. In contrast, managed cloud services eliminate the need for large capital investments in IT infrastructure and reduce operational costs by providing a pay-per-use model.

According to a survey conducted by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) in 2020, cost savings were cited as the most significant driver for cloud adoption among public sector organizations in the EU.

For example, in EMEA our public sector customers are showing their need to accelerate their cloud adoption, differentiating their cloud deployments between public cloud and sovereign cloud, depending on the sensitivity of the information and services managed.

Cloud services refer to the delivery of on-demand computing resources, including applications, storage, and processing power, over the internet. Instead of owning and maintaining physical servers and other infrastructure, cloud services allow businesses and individuals to use a shared pool of resources that are maintained and managed by a third-party provider.

Cloud services offer several advantages, such as scalability, flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use, making them an increasingly popular choice for businesses and individuals looking to leverage technology to achieve their goals.

Improving agility and responsiveness

Managed cloud services can help public sector institutions to improve their agility and responsiveness to changing business environments.

Cloud-based solutions offer enhanced flexibility, scalability, and availability, enabling organizations to rapidly adapt to changing business environments without worrying about the constraints imposed by traditional IT infrastructure. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged many public sector organizations to rapidly adapt to remote work environments, which would have been almost impossible without the use of cloud-based applications.

Another significant benefit of cloud adoption is improved data security and compliance. Cloud providers invest heavily in cybersecurity and data protection, providing organizations with robust security measures and reliable backup solutions.

Additionally, cloud services can help public sector organizations comply with various data privacy and regulatory requirements such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which mandates strict privacy and data protection measures for EU citizens.

Despite the many advantages of cloud adoption, public sector organizations in EMEA face specific challenges when transitioning to the cloud.

One of the biggest obstacles is the complex regulatory environment, which often differs across regions and countries. Moreover, many public sector organizations face resistance from IT personnel who are hesitant to embrace new technologies and processes; this challenge can be overcome by investing in staff training and development programs.

In addition, digital sovereignty is a growing concer as companies and governments are increasingly relying on cloud providers to store and process their data. The issue arises from the fact that cloud providers, often located in other countries, have access to sensitive data and can be subject to the laws and regulations of their own jurisdictions.

To address this issue, there is a need to establish policies and regulations that promote digital sovereignty, such as data localization requirements and the development of domestic cloud services, while also ensuring that international data flows are not unduly restricted.

In conclusion, the public sector adoption of cloud computing services in EMEA is picking up pace, driven by cost savings, increased agility, and data protection benefits.

Although challenges remain, public sector institutions that proactively embrace cloud technologies can gain significant benefits in terms of operational efficiencies, cost savings, and improved security. With the right strategies and investments, the public sector can deliver more responsive and cost-effective services to citizens, enabling them to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

This was one of the most significant findings of the final results of the Cloud in Africa 2023 study released today by World Wide Worx, with support from F5, Red Hat, Dell Technologies, Intel and VMware.

The study, based on interviews with 400 information technology decision makers in medium and large organisations across Africa, found that 63% of respondents across the continent had experienced an extremely positive impact on customer experience as a result of cloud computing. In South Africa and Kenya, that number jumped to 71%.

The two countries also shared a high impact on business growth: 51% of South African companies and 46% of those in Kenya reported strong business growth following migration to the cloud.

However, a gulf opened between the two countries when it came to the impact of cloud on innovation. In South Africa, 65% of respondents reported a high impact on innovation, while the proportion dropped to 36% in Kenya.

“Companies often move to the cloud seeking quick wins in the form of improved business efficiency or enhanced customer experience,” says Dion Harvey, Regional General Manager of Red Hat Sub Saharan Africa. “However, what we tend to see at Red Hat is that true value in the form of real innovation and impact on strategic goals is only realised once they have matured their thinking and approach to cloud.”

Asked what they saw as the biggest benefits of cloud computing in general, companies identified what World Wide Worx CEO Arthur Goldstuck, principal analyst on the research project, calls the cloud’s “golden quartet”: improved security, better customer experience, business efficiency and saleability.

However, the benefits were not equally distributed. Fewer than half of South African companies, 47%, reported security as a major benefit, compared to an average of 59%. The figure leaped to 78% in Ghana and 63% in Kenya. On the other hand, South Africa led the way in seeing scalability as a benefit, at 47%, compared to an average of 41%. Nigerian companies reflected the lowest response in this regard, at only 29%.

Alain Tshal, district manager of F5 for Sub-Saharan Africa, says that these results underline the extent to which the cloud is not a one-size-fits-all proposition in Africa.

“Every country is at a different level of maturity, and that has a major impact on both immediate benefits of migration and long-term benefits of use. South Africa has had the most extensive investment in hyperscale data centres over the past five years of any country in Africa, so it is no surprise to see that it has very different characteristics to most other markets.”

At the same time, where companies have accelerated their investment  in cloud computing, the impact is immediately apparent, says Goldstuck.

“The latest findings show that Kenya had the strongest growth in cloud computing in 2022, with a huge 84% of respondents reporting increased spend, compared to an average of 62%,” he says. “South Africa saw 55% of companies increasing their spend. That is partly a consequence of spending already having been high in previous years, compared to countries like Kenya.”

Companies from Malawi, Zambia and Botswana all reported a higher level of increased spend, while Nigeria and Ghana came in just below South Africa.

Expectations for 2023 flip around, however. While an overall average of 68% of companies expect to increase spending on cloud services this year, that jumps above 80% for Botswana and above 70% for South African and Nigeria.

In contrast, Kenya drops to the bottom of the list this year, with 51% of companies reporting they will increase their spend.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and Oracle today announced a multi-stage alliance to offer customers a greater choice of operating systems to run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

The strategic collaboration starts with Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on OCI as a supported operating system, improving the experience for organisations that rely on both OCI and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to fuel digital transformation and migration of mission-critical applications to the cloud.

Gartner’s “Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2020-2026, 4Q22 Update” states that “worldwide, public cloud services are forecast to grow 18.5% in 2023” while “organisations continue accelerating cloud adoption, which is driving a five-year compound annual growth rate of 19.6%.”

This growth indicates a need for broad support of customer choice, both in terms of cloud provider and the operating system underpinning cloud environments.

Ninety percent of the Fortune 500 currently rely on Red Hat and Oracle solutions. For many of these companies, Red Hat Enterprise Linux serves as their operating system foundation and OCI offers them high-performing, mission-critical cloud services, to power digital-forward operations. Now these organisations are able to standardise their cloud operations with Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on OCI, which enables customers to gain a common platform that stretches from their datacenter to the OCI distributed cloud.

With this strategic collaboration, certified configurations of OCI flexible virtual machines can now run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and customers can also migrate existing workloads already running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on OCI with greater confidence.

OCI flexible virtual machines can scale in increments as small as a single CPU to optimise price-performance and minimise wasted resources.

Customers can also contact both Red Hat and Oracle support to help resolve potential issues, with an expanded transparent, joint support agreement.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux forms the backbone of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud technology portfolio, which includes Red Hat OpenShift.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and additional technologies to support the modern cloud-native stack. With this collaboration, joint customers of Red Hat and Oracle can now create a foundation for future-forward computing deployments on Red Hat Enterprise Linux while still retaining the value of existing IT investments.

Availability

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now certified on OCI’s flexible virtual machines that offer from one up to 80 CPU cores in single CPU increments, and from 1GB memory per CPU up to a total of 1024 GB, depending on the processor. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is initially supported on the most recent OCI virtual machine shapes using AMD, Intel and Arm processors.

More information on launching Red Hat Enterprise Linux on OCI, including step by step directions, is available here.

In addition, planning work has begun for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be certified on OCI’s bare-metal servers, which can provide greater isolation and performance comparable to on-premises environments.

Using an artificial intelligence (AI) model, the project aims to boost the productivity of IT automation developers and make IT automation more achievable and understandable for diverse IT professionals with varied skills and backgrounds.

According to a 2021 IDC prediction, “by 2026, 85% of enterprises will combine human expertise with AI, ML, NLP, and pattern recognition to augment foresight across the organisation, making workers 25% more productive and effective.

“Technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, pattern recognition, and knowledge graphs are producing increasingly accurate and context-aware insights, predictions, and recommendations.”

Project Wisdom – underpinned by AI foundation models derived from IBM’s AI for Code efforts – works by enabling a user to input a command as a straightforward English sentence.

It then parses the sentence and builds the requested automation workflow, delivered as an Ansible Playbook, which can be used to automate any number of IT tasks.

Unlike other AI-driven coding tools, Project Wisdom does not focus on application development; instead the project centers on addressing the rise of complexity in enterprise IT as hybrid cloud adoption grows.

From human readable to human interactive

Becoming an automation expert demands significant effort and resources over time, with a learning curve to navigate varying domains. Project Wisdom intends to bridge the gap between Ansible YAML code and human language, so users can use plain English to generate syntactically correct and functional automation content.

It could enable a system administrator who typically delivers on-premises services to reach across domains to build, configure, and operate in other environments using natural language to generate playbook instructions. A developer who knows how to build an application, but not the skillset to provision it in a new cloud platform, could use Project Wisdom to expand proficiencies in these new areas to help transform the business. Novices across departments could generate content right away while still building foundational knowledge, without the dependencies of traditional teaching models.

Driving open source innovation with collaboration

While the power of AI in enterprise IT cannot be denied, community collaboration, along with insights from Red Hat and IBM, will be key in delivering an AI/ML model that aligns to the key tenets of open source technology.

Red Hat has more than two decades of experience in collaborating on community projects and protecting open source licenses in defense of free software.

Project Wisdom, and its underlying AI model, are an extension of this commitment to keeping all aspects of the code base open and transparent to the community.

As hybrid cloud operations at scale become a key focus for organisations, Red Hat is committed to building the next wave of innovation on open source technology.

As IBM Research and Ansible specialists at Red Hat work to fine tune the AI model, the Ansible community will play a crucial role as subject matter experts and beta testers to push the boundaries of what can be achieved together.

While community participation is still being worked through, those interested can stay up to date on progress here.

Speaking to this development, Chris Wright, CTO and SVP of Global Engineering, Red Hat, said:

“This project exemplifies how artificial intelligence has the power to fundamentally shift how businesses innovate, expanding capabilities that typically reside within operations teams to other corners of the business. With intelligent solutions, enterprises can decrease the barrier to entry, address  burgeoning skills gaps, and break down organisation-wide siloes to reimagine work in the enterprise world.”

Also, Ruchir Puri, chief scientist, IBM Research; IBM Fellow; vice president, IBM Technical Community, said:

“Project Wisdom is proof of the significant opportunities that can be achieved across technology and the enterprise when we combine the latest in artificial intelligence and software. It’s truly an exciting time as we continue advancing how today’s AI and hybrid cloud technologies are building the computers and systems of tomorrow.”

To combat this, automotive leaders are working to modernise and standardise practices in order to bring customers the latest and greatest in features and services while designing for functional safety.

As a result, automakers are shifting into high gear as they engage open source communities and organisations like Red Hat to bring greater flexibility, customer engagement and increased innovation to their vehicle designs.

Adopting universal open source software, such as Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System, can help automakers integrate software defined vehicles technologies into their line up more quickly than ever before.

Earlier this year, Red Hat announced a collaboration with General Motors to redefine the transportation landscape with a continuous functional-safety certified, Linux-based in-vehicle operating system. This helped set the stage for the use cases that will shape the collective automotive industry’s future.

This was just the first step of our journey; Red Hat also works with Qualcomm Technologies Inc. to develop and help deliver functional-safety certified systems built on Linux to support mission critical applications for automakers.

With this step, Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System will be integrated with and tested on the Snapdragon Digital Chassis–a set of cloud-connected platforms for telematics and connectivity, digital cockpit and advanced driver assistance.

By working together, Red Hat and Qualcomm Technologies can offer automakers the benefit of improved methodologies and processes to accelerate innovation at reduced costs.

The current state where automotive SoC vendors maintain private branches for Board Support Packages (BSPs), leaves automakers with a challenging support and maintenance problem.

 It takes a lot of resources and effort to keep SoC support current as the underlying operating system evolves.  By committing to fully leverage the open source approach, employing an “upstream first” philosophy and limiting out of tree elements in board and device support, the goal of long lived support and continued feature innovation as the underlying open source baseline evolves can be realised.

While rapid transformation doesn’t happen overnight, collaborative work like this within our ecosystem of customers and partners is crucial to building, testing, and certifying Linux-based automotive systems.

With better, increased automation for safety certification steps, re-certification–which has often been a bottleneck within the industry– can occur in a fraction of the typically required time.

This is how Red Hat is helping drive automakers forward–by not only providing open technologies, but by helping the automotive world understand, adapt to and embrace open source concepts for the benefits of the whole ecosystem and end customers.