Red Hat Highlights ‘Telco to Techno’ Shift With AI and Cloud at MWC Barelona

Red Hat showcases the "telco to techno" evolution at MWC through AI-driven automation and unified cloud platforms.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Red Hat presented its "telco to techno" theme to demonstrate how traditional telecom companies are changing their business operations to match the standards of tech companies such as Meta, Amazon, Google, and Apple, among others. The organization demonstrates this shift through its financial commitments to emerging technologies and its efforts to build digital service capabilities. Andrew Brown, Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer at Red Hat, said that the MWC theme fits well with increasing awareness of the transition from workloads to platforms, enabled by 6G, digital sovereignty, AI, and other innovations.

Furthermore, Fran Heeran, Vice President and Head of Global Telco Sales, elaborated on Brown’s statement by highlighting the telcos’ need for a common cloud infrastructure in recent times. He termed their desire to move to a much more consistent and common infrastructure for both network and IT workloads as “foundational”. Next, he underscored the importance of incorporating AI in automation. Even though self-optimizing autonomous networks have been a dominant theme in telco recently, Heeran pointed out that automation moves from theory to practice only through the addition of AI.

Also, touching upon the idea of digital sovereignty, Heeran described the idea as being misunderstood to a certain extent. Contrary to a prevalent regional understanding of sovereignty, national sovereignty is a key aspect even within the same region. He also predicted there would be an opportunity for operators to capture the market despite the hyperscalers’ dominance. Moreover, he emphasized the lessons learnt by telcos from the 5G phase in preparing better for the transition to 6G, with enterprise and advanced wearables being in the spotlight. According to Brown, “We’re seeing a more iterative approach to the generations. I think there are use cases that are around even today, and with open-source technologies, with 6G, there’s a coming together of capability that actually, for the enterprise, makes this real in maybe a shorter timeline than 10 years.” CIO Bulletin concurs with Red Hat’s view on the transformation from telco to techno in what are exciting times ahead for the industry.