NEC and Red Hat expand global collaboration

NEC Corporation and Red Hat, Inc. have announced an expanded global collaboration to drive IT modernization and digital transformation on Red Hat OpenShift. NEC now recognizes Red Hat OpenShift, the industry's leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, as its preferred container platform for mission-critical applications, and 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 emphasized helping customers to deploy and operate solutions on container applications, including Red Hat OpenShift(1).

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, powerful container platform to help organizations build, deploy and run applications across IT environments, whether on-premises, in the cloud or at the edge. In combination with NEC's 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 organize 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(2) 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.

Supported by the above initiatives, NEC and Red Hat will develop a global market development strategy to accelerate the deployment of core DX, global 5G, and solutions for key industries such as digital finance and digital government. NEC and Red Hat look forward to expanding this collaboration for the greater benefit of domestic and international customers in these key industries.