Huawei and Red Hat, Inc., on Tuesday announced that they are expanding their cooperation to include public and network functions virtualization (NFV) clouds. The announcement expands upon previously announced collaborations between Huawei and Red Hat to deliver OpenStack-based solutions (December 2014) and carrier-grade software-defined networking (SDN) solutions (June 2016).

The new strategic business and engineering cooperation is designed to enable Huawei customers to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for critical services both on-premises and on Huawei's public cloud platform. In addition, the expanded collaboration is aimed at providing a new solution portfolio for carriers to build NFV clouds.

"Huawei helps customers achieve business successes by sticking to our ‘Openness, Cooperation, Win-Win’ policy and devoting to establishing a positive ICT ecosystem. We are delighted to work with Red Hat to jointly help develop the cloud computing industry and better serve customers with greater product choice," said Sun Jiawei, Director, IT Business Development Department, Huawei.

"We are honored to expand our strategic relationship with Huawei, enabling leading global telecommunication companies with the power of open source to innovate and compete," said Margaret Dawson, senior director, Global Product Marketing, Cloud and Telecommunications, at Red Hat.

For the public cloud, Red Hat plans to validate the Huawei public cloud platform as deployed by Huawei and Huawei’s public cloud partners to support enterprise customers using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Red Hat solutions, such as the company’s middleware and

In May 2016, Forrester published a report titled Brief: China’s Clouds Come to Europe, in which it recommends consideration of Huawei’s solutions for the European public cloud market. In The Forrester Wave: Public Cloud Platforms In China, Q4 2016, Huawei was named as a strong performer in China's public cloud market. In 2016, Red Hat was named a leader in two Forrester research reports ranking private cloud software suites and hybrid cloud management solutions: The Forrester Wave: Private Cloud Software Suites, Q1 2016 and The Forrester Wave: Hybrid Cloud Management Solutions, Q1 2016.

The introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, in this cooperation is expected to further enhance Huawei’s public cloud platform. For its NFV cloud, Huawei plans to certify its Virtualized Network Function (VNF) layer to work with Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The certification of Red Hat OpenStack Platform is expected to be completed in the first half of 2017.