Raleigh-based Red Hat Inc. and Ericsson have announced what they call “a broad alliance to deliver fully open source and production-ready cloud infrastructure, spanning OpenStack, software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined infrastructure (SDI).

Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies, Red Hat , said in a satement, “Red Hat believes that the future of the communications industry will be defined by modern architectures and open source solutions spanning the hybrid cloud, containers, software-defined infrastructure and Network Function Visualizaation (NFV. )

“Ericsson shares that belief, and together we can bring the communications industry into the future with open, more secure and highly scalable solutions that enable customers to transform their businesses and deliver on the promise of IoT, 5G and more.”

Jason Hoffman, head of Product Area Cloud Infrastructure, Ericsson added, “The future is open and software defined. Combining Red Hat, the world’s leading open source provider, with Ericsson, the world’s leader in NFV telecom transformation, creates customer speed and choice while enabling customers to confidently embrace open source. Our job is to enable our customers to grow faster in rapidly changing times. This alliance drives exactly this.”

The companies note they have long worked together to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss Middleware to Ericsson customers. Today the companies say they are expanding the collaboration to focus on helping define the next generation of modern technology for the communications industry, including:

Upstream collaboration: The companies are taking an “upstream first” approach to collaboration across open source projects and communities – including OPNFV, OpenStack, and OpenDaylight – to address customer concerns about lock-in resulting from proprietary forks, differentiating the partnership from other providers. Engineering teams from both companies will collaborate to address customer requirements in upstream open source projects, helping accelerate technology innovation for scalable cloud deployments.

Solution certification and new joint offerings: Red Hat and Ericsson are collaborating on hardware and software roadmaps, aimed at developing new joint offerings.

Technical alignment to advance container innovation and adoption: Both Red Hat and Ericsson see container technologies as a major part of the platform evolution and will collaborate in upstream activities.

Professional services: Customers looking to evolve their businesses in NFV, IT and datacenter modernization can benefit from Red Hat’s consulting and training expertise in open source and emerging technology enablement, and Ericsson’s expertise in end-to-end consulting, systems integration, managed services, and support services.