Vodafone Idea Recognised as Innovator of the Year at Red Hat Summit 2020
Mumbai: Vodafone Idea Limited claimed the top honors at the Red Hat Summit 2020, winning the ‘Innovator of the Year’ title for orchestrating the vision of a single, universal cloud into reality. This win has been a recognition for Vodafone Idea’s early adoption of emerging technologies for enterprise and retail customers, which has now lead to VIL owning the largest cloud deployment in India linking using open source infrastructure. This initiative will further help Vodafone Idea in reducing latency in carrying multiple workloads and optimizing costs.
As part of Red Hat Innovation Awards each year, a panel of industry expert judges select the top five winning projects from a pool of global nominations. These five projects are selected based on the set of criteria for outstanding and innovative usage of Red Hat solutions. From the five winners, the Red Hat Innovator of the Year is selected by the community through online voting.
Speaking on this achievement, Vishant Vora, Chief Technology Officer, Vodafone Idea said, “A distributed universal cloud centrally orchestrated is an ambitious project for us, representing a vision for the telco future where “pods” could be geographically distributed across the country. Our vision is to build a universal cloud that will not only carry the traditional telco workloads but also carry IT and enterprise offerings for our customers. This will also position VIL very well for the nextGen services like IoT, Blockchain etc. These capabilities need to be accommodated with a versatile and scalable platform offering flexibility and control as an organization. We are extremely proud of receiving this prestigious award.”
Vodafone Idea’s universal cloud has been a unique boon in recent weeks where India’s population of 1.3 billion people has been in lockdown, dependent on network and communications support. Within a week of lockdown, Vodafone Idea had experienced a year’s worth of traffic growth. All of this has been possible through the large-scale deployment of cloud technologies that VIL has done over the past 18 months.
Chris Wright, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Red Hat, shared, “We want to extend congratulations to Vodafone Idea Limited for receiving the 2020 Red Hat Innovator of the Year award. Vodafone Idea’s journey in building a Universal Cloud, hosting both Network and IT workloads, based on open standards, is truly impressive. By adopting Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Vodafone Idea Limited and its customers can more quickly adapt to changing market conditions. We are proud to be working with Vodafone Idea Limited on this shared vision and we look forward to continuing our work with them as they look to build out additional offerings on this flexible platform.”
Vodafone Idea took on the challenge of transforming its network to make it future ready and building a Universal Network Cloud that is workload agnostic from core to edge. It enables Vodafone Idea to better serve its more than 300 million subscribers by simplifying and transforming its IT and telecom network operations. The new platform is deployed across many distributed Vodafone Idea cloud microsites across India, as well as its central IT operations.