Turkey remains a top contender for European telco development 

Turkey remains a top contender for European telco development 

Turkey’s telco sector is booming thanks to global telecommunications providers offering their services. Here, we take a look at how Nokia and Red Hat are helping the country to continue innovating and meet their Digital Transformation needs.

Nokia has announced that it has signed a partnership agreement with Karel, a Turkish electronics manufacturer, to manufacture 4G and 5G base stations in Turkey. The companies intend to start producing 4G base stations for the local market by mid-2022.

With 5G expected to become commercial in Turkey in 2023, local production is also expected to include 5G base stations.

“We are very excited about this announcement,” Ozgur Erzincan, Country Senior Officer Turkey at Nokia. “Turkey is an important market for Nokia, where we have strong business and long-standing, trusted relationships with our customers. Together with Karel, we will be able to fulfil all the domestic product demand from our customers for now and in the future.”

“We are going through a period of significant change, in which technology develops very rapidly and the transition to new generation communication systems is ongoing,” said Sinan Tunaoğlu, Chairman of the Board, Karel. “As Karel, we are moving forward with the vision and goal of becoming a global player in the field of technology with our R&D, qualified production power, knowledge and experience. We are very excited about this cooperation that we started with Nokia, one of the world’s leading technology companies. We believe this will create a long-term, growing and value-adding alliance.”

Karel has one of the most advanced R&D departments in Turkey in the communication electronics field today, and the company’s modern facilities are compliant with international standards. Established with 100% domestic capital, Karel is a market leader in Turkey and among the top 15 manufacturers globally, exporting products and technologies to more than 30 countries.

Another leading technology provider helping to digitally transform one of Turkey’s key telco suppliers is Red Hat. This collaboration has meant Türk Telekom has cut time to market from days to seconds and improves application performance with Red Hat’s cloud-native technologies tailored for the open hybrid cloud.

As a world-leading provider of open source solutions, Red Hat announced that Türk Telekom, Turkey’s first and leading integrated telecommunications operator, has deployed Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading Kubernetes platform, for use across its business to develop and scale cloud-native applications from core to Edge for faster innovation.

Founded more than 180 years ago, Türk Telekom offers mobile, Internet, phone, PSTN, wholesale and retail broadband services and TV products and services to millions across the country. The group’s vision is to be at the vanguard of introducing new technologies to Turkey to accelerate the country’s transformation into an information society.

Many communications service providers around the world are finding it increasingly challenging to meet customer demands in the context of ongoing Digital Transformation across industries and more recently, disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic. Türk Telekom wanted to apply cutting-edge application technologies and methods in order to deliver services more dynamically.

With this collaboration, Red Hat supported Türk Telekom with optimising its microservices architecture and consolidating services and data management and analysis. It standardised on Red Hat OpenShift as the foundational horizontal application platform for greater ease of deployment and scaling. Red Hat Consulting and Red Hat Training provided upskilling programs to help Türk Telekom to get the best value from its cloud-native technologies and to be more agile using microservices and CI/CD. Türk Telekom also leaned on the expertise of Red Hat services to help define a security architecture that takes advantage of OpenShift’s native features including network and container isolation and application data access protection.

Türk Telekom’s strategy targets 30 key applications for migration to OpenShift. A total of 10 applications are live today on the platform, providing an enhanced experience for customers. For example, the performance of game distribution platform Playstore.com has increased by up to 30% since its migration to OpenShift. Red Hat consultants continue to collaborate with Türk Telekom to shift workloads successfully, including one migration that completed three weeks ahead of schedule.

The 30 applications cover functions that span from core to Edge and aim to improve operations as well as consumer and enterprise service delivery, such as:

  • Monitoring customer usage to make personalised offers using Artificial Intelligence (AI)
  • AI-powered holistic automation of infrastructure
  • Music-distribution application muud
  • Asset management using Blockchain technologies
  • A managed cloud offering for enterprise customers
  • Internal network reporting and monitoring, as well as energy consumption analysis using Internet of Things (IoT) data collected from Edge sites

Using Red Hat OpenShift’s self-service capabilities Türk Telekom can deploy applications in as little as 90 seconds compared to taking days previously, with automation helping remove manual processes so developers can be more productive. More agile life cycle management as well as autoscaling enables the business to bring new capabilities and updates to market as they are ready and manage workloads dynamically, instead of limiting production pushes to specific days. Additionally, Red Hat OpenShift Virualization is enabling virtual machine workloads to be run and managed alongside container workloads. OpenShift holistically helps improve cost effectiveness and efficiency for the business.

Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation provides Türk Telekom with the capability to manage storage centrally. For more agile integration with internal and partner applications as part of its microservices infrastructure, Türk Telekom is also in the process of implementing Red Hat 3scale API Management and Red Hat AMQ messaging platform. It is also planning on bringing in Red Hat OpenStack Platform as a foundation for its private cloud.

“Türk Telekom is using innovative technologies to better serve customers and shows no signs of slowing down on its journey to transform technology, processes and culture to become a modern, more agile service provider,” Honoré LaBourdette, Vice President, Telecoms, Media and Entertainment, Red Hat. “We are proud to collaborate closely with Türk Telekom to help it grow in a more flexible way and streamline costs and operations, with Red Hat OpenShift as its core cloud-native application platform taking care of scaling, provisioning and container orchestration. We are excited to see Türk Telekom step up its competitiveness by being able to get to market faster and adaptively improve customer experience on demand.”

“Applications are changing the world and we need to manage our own and our customers’ needs in a digital way,” said Mehmet Fatih Bekin, Data Center and Cloud Services Director, Türk Telekom. We needed to rely on an experienced partner and we are happy to have found this in Red Hat. With Red Hat, we have gained flexibility and an ability to address challenges more proactively, which is very important as we have many mission critical products. Red Hat OpenShift frees up our staff to focus on making positive contributions to the business. And with its open source development model, Red Hat can deliver platform innovation and fixes faster. Overall, Red Hat has made our Digital Transformation path a lot easier.”

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