Red Hat and Orange have launched a joint engineering program focused on accelerating innovation in network virtualization. The collaboration is designed to bring new NFV (network functions virtualization) capabilities into OpenStack and other open source projects, while also addressing the specific operational and technical needs of communications service providers.
The program’s primary objective is to contribute additional features and reference implementations that make NFV-based infrastructures more interoperable, scalable, and manageable. By working inside open source communities, the partners aim to ensure the features they develop are useful across operators’ deployments and aligned with industry-standard practices.
A notable outcome of this collaboration is the integration of the OpenStack BGP VPN project and its reference implementation, BaGPipe. Orange served as a lead contributor to that integration, helping advance an approach that leverages standard routing protocols to interconnect cloud and NFV data centers. The BGP VPN initiative enables operators to securely and efficiently connect Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or NFV cloud resources and enterprise networks using common, well-understood routing mechanisms.
Orange has made NFV a central element of its network transformation strategy. As part of that strategy, the company is deploying a standardized, multinational NFV infrastructure that must deliver the scale and agility required by modern telecom services. To support this rollout, Orange selected the Red Hat OpenStack Platform as the foundation for its massively scalable IaaS. The choice reflects a need for an open, enterprise-grade cloud platform that integrates with ecosystem tools and storage solutions.
Red Hat’s technologies, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage, are positioned as the core components of Orange’s standardized NFVi (network functions virtualization infrastructure). These components provide a combination of platform compatibility, data persistence, and operational tooling that operators expect when moving workloads to an NFV model.
Darrell Jordan-Smith, Vice President of Global Information and Communications Technology at Red Hat, emphasized the strategic and community-oriented nature of the partnership: “Orange is embracing a role as a modern open communications provider, not only by deploying a fully open technology platform with Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage but also by adding its expertise to community development efforts. We’re very pleased that our technologies power Orange’s standardized NFVi platform and we’re excited to continue our collaboration in open source initiatives, aimed at delivering new business value to the industry.”
The collaboration between Red Hat and Orange underscores several trends shaping the telecom industry. First, operators are increasingly relying on open source platforms to avoid vendor lock-in and to accelerate innovation. Second, NFV and cloud-native principles are being adopted to support faster service delivery, automation, and resource efficiency. Third, community-driven development—where operators contribute code and operational experience back to projects—helps ensure that open source tools evolve to meet carrier-grade requirements.
By contributing to OpenStack projects such as BGP VPN and helping refine reference implementations like BaGPipe, Orange and Red Hat are investing in reusable components that can be adopted by other service providers. These efforts reduce integration complexity for operators that want to interconnect distributed clouds or combine NFV deployments across multiple sites. Using widely accepted routing technologies for interconnect also simplifies network design and leverages operator expertise in IP networking.
For communications service providers, the joint engineering program represents a pragmatic path to modernize their infrastructure while maintaining alignment with open standards and community best practices. For the broader ecosystem, contributions from large operators and platform vendors help mature critical projects, accelerate feature adoption, and improve interoperability across vendor implementations.
Looking ahead, the collaboration is likely to continue producing enhancements that simplify NFV adoption, improve multi-site connectivity, and provide more robust operational models for telecom clouds. By combining Red Hat’s open platform technologies with Orange’s operational experience and contributions to community projects, the partnership seeks to deliver practical, production-ready capabilities that address the evolving demands of network virtualization.