Russia’s largest mobile operator has partnered with Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, to build a digital ecosystem based on open source.
MTS plans to leverage the vendor’s Charmed OpenStack’s lifecycle management and cloud-native architecture to better enable multi-vendor and cross-platform integration.
The operator serves more than 77 million subscribers in Russia, and the partnership is intended to decrease time-to-market and speeding up deployment of new services for them.
Towards 5G
This includes moving towards 5G deployment and reducing the total cost of ownership of cloud infrastructure. MTS plans to upgrade its core network technology and set up a competence centre to develop OpenStack-based solutions.
MTS will begin “operationally rolling out the project next year”, ultimately deploying Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack solution across 11 data centres in Russia.
Move to open source
MTS CTO, Victor Belov (pictured), commented, “The selection of OpenStack is another step forward in our strategy to migrate towards open source software. Building an ecosystem based on OpenStack will speed up our technology adoption, lay a foundation for future 5G rollout, and enhance our network’s edge compute capabilities.
“This solution will also enable us to improve virtualisation cost effectiveness, as well as expand our ability to leverage a wide variety of virtual platforms. That will not only help us maintain a technical edge in the Russian telecom industry, but also enhance our IT agility and enable us to tackle complex challenges to better meet the needs of our customers.”