- Verizon took to the keynote stage at Red Hat Summit to talk up its network modernization work with the vendor
- But Red Hat CTO Chris Wright said it is also working with operators on OSS/BSS transformation
- Sovereign infrastructure is another emerging area of focus, he added
Verizon has been keeping a low profile recently, but that didn’t stop the operator from showing up at Red Hat Summit in Atlanta to talk up how the vendor is enabling its network transformation. Red Hat CTO Chris Wright said the vendor is helping operators with more than just network modernization.
Speaking during a keynote address, Verizon VP of Technology Development and Network Planning Praveen Atreya said the operator has been working to shift to a software-centric network model. The goal is to make it move faster and be more responsive to customer needs. To enable this transition, Atreya said Verizon built a private cloud platform – the creatively named Verizon Cloud Platform – that extends from the core of its network to the edge.
“This is what offers control, security, observability and a host of common capabilities that essentially enables every network element to now become an application,” Atreya said. That’s a big deal when you’re managing a heterogeneous, multi-generational network at the scale Verizon is.
“You’re simultaneously running modern, highly decomposed microservices alongside legacy, monolithic applications on VMs,” he said. And this is where having a single hybrid platform that handles all of this – seamless transition of workloads, enabling various heritages of applications to work closely together – it makes a big difference.”
According to Atreya, the platform has also helped Verizon advance its automation ambitions by allowing it to better parlay its network data into actions. In 2025 alone, he said Verizon made “millions of changes” to the network – both planned lifecycle management and unplanned remediation – in “closed-loop mode” with no human in the loop. And there’s more to come.
“Where we’re going is 10x. With AI, everyone is a developer, and with agentic AI, your best folks can be amplified and scaled almost limitlessly,” Atreya said. “What we can do in the context of agentic AI with network automation is far beyond what we can do with structured automation.”
What are the three key areas of focus for Red Hat?
Wright said, however, at a media roundtable that network transformation is just one of three key areas where Red Hat is focusing its efforts with operators.
Immediately connected to the network efforts are those around OSS and BSS, which run like IT in support of the network. Red Hat is working with operators to help modernize those applications, he said. And it’s also helping support their traditional IT needs.
He pointed to sovereign infrastructure as the third focal point of its telco strategy.
“That’s an area that’s really getting a lot of attention right now because AI is a big, important transition for everybody,” Wright said. National operators, he added, are in a prime position to serve up sovereign infrastructure.
Telenor is one of the companies Red Hat is working with on this front. During his keynote presentation, Red Hat Chief Product Officer Ashesh Badani said Telenor has built an AI factory using Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia as the software foundation.
“This is Norway’s first sovereign and secure AI cloud service,” Badani said. “They’re hosting Norway’s own language models. They’re accelerating industrial automation, voice translation, private 5G network optimization, just as some examples.”
But Verizon and Telenor weren’t the only operators that factored in at Summit.
AT&T co-hosted a breakout session with Red Hat on scaling AI agents from pilot to production. And Belgium’s Telenet Business announced it has rearchitected its private cloud with Red Hat OpenShift.