Red Hat Targets Unix Boxes at Telecom Companies

Published: June 26, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Almost a year ago, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat announced that it was going to try to push its variant of Linux into the telecommunications companies of the world and the network equipment providers (NEPs) that create the back-end platforms that go into making up the wired and wireless phone networks that we depend on. Now, Red Hat is getting a little more active about chasing Unix out of the telecom companies and getting its Red Hat Enterprise Linux installed.

Last week, Red Hat announced it had made an acquisition of an open source middleware software provider called Mobicents, which has created a fault tolerant, Java runtime specifically for telecom companies that converges voice, video, and data streams into a single platform. (Specifically, the SIP protocol for Voice over IP and various Web protocols are merged.) According to Red Hat, the Mobicents platform adds a service logic execution environment (SLEE) on top of the Red Hat Linux-JBoss stack and allows very high throughout; a typical network switch has to field about 10 times as many call initiations as a Web server serves up Web pages in the same interval of time. Speed matters for a cell phone--particularly if you want to keep your customers. By the way, Java SLEE, or JSLEE, is an emerging telcom standard, and Mobicents is the first open source product that has been certified as compliant with the JSLEE 1.0 standard.

Financial details of the Mobicents acquisition were not revealed by Red Hat.

Red Hat also announced last week that it has joined the SCOPE Alliance, a collection of hardware, software, and application software suppliers that promote carrier-grade platforms; SCOPE does not, by the way, create standards, but rather stands behind those open telecom standards created by other bodies in the telco space. SCOPE was founded in January 2006 Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, and Siemens. Linux is obviously a big part of what SCOPE is promoting, but now that Solaris is open source, so is Unix.

Last November, Red Hat announced a partnership with Nokia that puts Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the position of preferred (but not exclusive) operating system to support Nokia's Networks Business Group, which makes a telecom switching and application system called FlexiPlatform. The FlexiPlatform product is a platform for running third-generation (3G) telecom services, such as text messaging, videos, and other applications that are delivered to cell phones.

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