NEC Corporation and Red Hat expand global collaboration

NEC Corporation and Red Hat have announced an expanded global collaboration to drive IT modernisation and digital transformation on Red Hat OpenShift.

NEC now recognises Red Hat OpenShift as its preferred container platform for mission-critical applications. In addition, this expansion will strengthen the technical cooperation between the two companies in this area, including the formation of a Center of Excellence and joint technology development.

NEC was recently announced as a Red Hat Premier Business Partner and was the first certified partner to support Red Hat OpenShift in Japan. Since then, NEC has emphasised helping customers to deploy and operate solutions on container applications, including Red Hat OpenShift, the company states.

Building on a longstanding relationship, the two companies plan to deliver solutions using Red Hat OpenShift to support NEC offerings such as Core DX, Global 5G, Digital Finance and Digital Government to customers globally.

Red Hat OpenShift provides a more consistent container platform to help organisation's build, deploy and run applications across IT environments, whether on-premises, in the cloud or at the edge.

In combination with NECs portfolio of solutions, customers can more effectively manage hybrid cloud, multicloud and edge deployments to meet their business needs and scale into the future.

NEC and Red Hat are working together in the following areas to deliver greater support for global enterprise transformation:

Collaborative Center of Excellence: NEC and Red Hat will organise a joint technical support system (collaborative Center of Excellence) consisting of more than 100 personnel from both companies, mainly architects who are familiar with container technology and Red Hat products, so that customers can use NEC's solutions together with Red Hat OpenShift with confidence.

The two companies will contribute to improving the quality and reliability of customers' IT system infrastructure and applications by consistently providing best practices in system design, technical support, and evaluation environments for deploying each solution. This will be the first Center of Excellence of its kind jointly offered by Red Hat and a Red Hat Premier Business Partner in Japan and one of the largest in Asia.

Joint technology development: NEC and Red Hat will strengthen joint engineering activities, including Kubernetes community collaboration and co-located global engineering resources in order to expand NEC's solutions with Red Hat OpenShift. With deeper technical collaboration, the companies intend to cooperate in providing end-to-end solutions with Red Hat OpenShift that reflect the requirements of mission-critical applications, such as improved availability and operational continuity and support services for mission-critical areas that can more quickly resolve customers' technical issues, the company states.

Matt Hicks, President and Chief Executive Officer, Red Hat, says, "As global enterprises use increasingly more complex systems and workloads to meet dynamic market demands, the need for abstraction and simplicity across their IT footprints becomes clear.

"Our expanded collaboration with NEC focuses on simplifying a broad range of transformative enterprise initiatives by delivering solutions built on a single, standardised, innovation platform in Red Hat OpenShift. With Red Hat's hybrid cloud expertise and NECs skill in delivering industry-specific solutions, we're providing our joint customers with the capabilities they need to fully evolve into digital enterprises, without miring them in complexity."

Takayuki Morita, President and Chief Executive Officer, NEC, says, "We are very pleased to announce the strengthening of our strategic collaboration with Red Hat globally.

"Through this collaboration, NEC will adopt Red Hat OpenShift as our container platform of choice to provide solutions to government and enterprise customers who are making the digital shift by linking them with NEC's solutions for Core DX, 5G, digital finance, and digital government, which are NEC's business areas of focus. Together with Red Hat, we are confident that we can lead the expansion and success of a wide range of customers' businesses."