Red Hat Expands Footprint in Telecommunications to Support Next-Generation Communications

Red Hat has announced steps taken to expand its footprint in the telecommunications market. Recognizing the increasing demands for technology providers to support the incredible amounts of data transfer -- audio, video, multimedia -- Red Hat is expanding its solutions portfolio to deepen its support of the telecommunications community through open source. Today, the company is announcing the acquisition of Mobicents technology and its new membership to the SCOPE alliance. Red Hat will work to provide the infrastructure software, platforms and tools to enable next-generation service creation, delivery and management in the telecommunications industry."As the telecommunications industry undergoes fundamental transformation, traditional Telcos must prepare for a new competitive environment that demands greater innovation, faster time to market, responsible investment and new ways of thinking," said Joanne Rohde, executive vice president of verticals marketing at Red Hat. "Open Source is becoming strategic in Telecom, not only as a means to reduce costs, but as a model to inspire collaboration, inclusion and reuse -- and to drive innovation. Today, Red Hat software is routinely deployed in mission-critical Telco IT and Network environments around the world. Through our investment in Mobicents, our alignment with the SCOPE Alliance and strong commitment to standards, we look forward to establishing Red Hat and open source software as fundamental building blocks for the successful Telcom companies of the future."

"Telcos are continuing to increase their migration to integrated platforms and solutions that leverage open source software and industry standard hardware," said Ali Kafel, VP, Telco, Stratus Technologies. "The ftServer system and Red Hat Enterprise Linux are proving to be popular building blocks for mission-critical and carrier-grade applications throughout the Telco IT and Network environments. Stratus looks forward to continued collaboration with Red Hat to deliver platforms and solutions to this market."

For Red Hat, the acquisition of Mobicents technology adds a Service Logic Execution Environment (SLEE) to Red Hat's technology portfolio. It complements J2EE to enable convergence of voice, video and data in next-generation intelligent applications. In the telecommunications industry with call setup transactions as many as ten times the number of web data transactions per second, Mobicents enables high throughput with low latency.

Mobicents is a highly scalable event-driven application server with a robust component model and fault tolerant execution environment that is effective beyond the telecommunications industry. It is the first and only Open Source Platform certified for JSLEE 1.0 compliance. Web and SIP can be combined together to achieve a more sophisticated and natural user experience. Mobicents also provides a network abstraction layer that insulates developers from the underlying complexities of legacy telecommunications network protocols and enables rapid development of new services and seamless deployment across IP and legacy Telco networks.

Red Hat intends to develop a communications platform offering that integrates Mobicents with the broader Red Hat middleware offerings. More information about subscription product offerings will be available later this year. In the interim, Red Hat will offer a pilot/beta program and a "bridge support" offering for development and deployment of production applications and solutions that incorporate Mobicents technology.

"JSLEE is an important emerging industry standard for even-driven architecture that is gaining its early traction in telecommunications industry," said Yefim Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner. " An open source offering in this space extends the available options for users looking into event-driven computing and architecture."

Industry Alliances
For the past two years, Red Hat has been collaborating with industry-leading equipment and software providers to develop integrated solutions to meet customer needs. In 2006 Red Hat announced participation in OPUCE, a European Community Framework Program's Sixth Framework Program (FP6) project designed to deliver the next-generation telecommunication service delivery platform (SDP) based on open standards and open source software for use across the EU. Red Hat experts will be responsible for building an open source ecosystem around OPUCE and

for bringing direct expertise on how to build open source communities and support mission-critical environments based on open source software.

Today Red Hat is announcing new membership to the SCOPE Alliance and will be contributing to the definition and prioritization of carrier-grade operating system and middleware requirements. Red Hat will also work with the broader Linux community to define a roadmap for availability of carrier-grade operating system requirements. The SCOPE Alliance, formed in January 2006 by Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Nokia and Siemens, was founded to drive the adoption of open source software and commodity hardware in carrier-grade environments as an alternative to proprietary Unix platforms. SCOPE works with leading NEPs and Carriers worldwide to define hardware and software requirements for open platforms in mission-critical telecommunications environments. SCOPE currently develops requirements profiles for various hardware and software components, including a profile for carrier-grade Linux (CGL).