Canonical has struck a three-year deal with Ericsson to power up the Ericsson’s Cloud System platform with the Ubuntu operating system.

Canonical is making a lot of headway with its Ubuntu system and has closed yet another important partnership, this time with Ericsson, which is a giant telecommunications company. Some of you might think that it's that company that used to make phones, but in fact it's a company that provides crucial communication services across the globe.

The deal revolves around OPNFV (NFV/VNF) and IT cloud. NFV stands for Network Function Virtualization and OPNFV is a platform that is an ideal deployment platform for NFV workloads. To put things into perspective, Ericsson networks bear 40% of the world’s mobile traffic and connect more than 2.5 billion subscribers globally, which is a quite lot. This makes the deal with Canonical a very important one, especially for the developers of the Ubuntu system.

Canonical and Ericsson want to drive cloud innovation

The importance of the cloud is getting to be much more than anyone could have anticipated and many companies are moving or using the cloud for various purposes. In this case it's about telecom solutions, but this is just a small part of the infrastructure. And, like all clouds, it needs to be governed by an operating system. Ericsson is choosing Ubuntu for this task.

"Under the terms of the partnership, Ericsson will deploy Ubuntu as the host OS for Ericsson’s Cloud System platform. Ubuntu Server OS will underpin Ericsson’s offering for its telecommunications network, internal data center and cloud computing customers; giving customers the choice and flexibility they’ve been waiting for, and assisting the global adoption of OpenStack-based cloud technologies. The move will help both organizations respond to increasing demand from telecoms companies and enterprises for more flexible, scalable options to meet the ever-growing appetite for new services," reads the announcement.

It looks like Canonical is making a lot of friends in high places and Ubuntu is becoming the platform of choice, even if it's just a simple server setup or an OS powering the cloud solution for a major communications company.