Red Hat and Mirantis both announced large agreements this week that bring their respective OpenStack technologies to carrier partners. The news comes ahead of the OpenStack Summit that kicks off in Barcelona, Spain, on Oct. 24.

Red Hat announced on Oct. 19 that it has a new OpenStack partnership with telco provider Ericsson.

"Ericsson and Red Hat recognize that we share a common belief in using open source to transform the telecommunications industry, and we are collaborating to bring more open solutions, from OpenStack-based clouds to software-defined networking and infrastructure, to customers," Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of OpenStack at Red Hat, told eWEEK.

From a practical standpoint, the Red Hat-Ericsson alliance means the two vendors will collaborate in upstream communities such as OpenStack, OPNFV and OpenDayLight; they will provide solution certification and joint offerings, including certifying Ericsson's portfolio of solutions on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenStack Platform; and Ericsson will expand its network-functions virtualization (NFV) infrastructure to include Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

Ericsson alliance with Red Hat isn't its first foray into OpenStack. In 2014, Ericsson inked a deal with Red Hat rival Mirantis, which at the time was one of the largest OpenStack deals ever made—a five-year deal to deploy Mirantis carrier-grade OpenStack software in the Ericsson cloud software platform.

Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, said Ericsson is pursuing a multi-VIM (virtual infrastructure manager) strategy.

"Despite their Red Hat announcement, [Ericsson] still remains a Mirantis partner and user of Mirantis OpenStack," Renski told eWEEK. "However, as is the case with most everybody in this industry, they look to provide their customers with choice when it comes to VIM platforms they integrate with as opposed to locking every customer to Mirantis OpenStack exclusively."

Renski added that Mirantis is not working exclusively with Ericsson in telco either.

"We welcome this move by Ericsson as it promotes customer choice and are confident that telcos will continue choosing our products based on merit and quality," Renski said.

On Oct. 20, Mirantis announced a telco alliance of its own with NTT Communications. The NTT agreement is a partnership to jointly offer a managed OpenStack offering (Mirantis on the software, NTT on the hardware) and have it off-premises in NTT Com data centers, said Jim Sangster, Mirantis' senior director of Solutions Marketing. NTT Com has 140 locations across Asia, the United States and Europe.

"We'll be offering Mirantis Managed OpenStack in all of NTT Com's data centers," Sangster told eWEEK. "The partnership is indefinite, and the size of deployments will be based on the joint customers we obtain over time."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.