MTN Nigeria intends to expand a cloud native environment to run core network services and any other solutions available on its network.
Kenneth Odo, senior manager, infrastructure and cloud support for MTN Nigeria, stated this at the Red Hat Summit Connect 2025 in Johannesburg last week.
According to Odo, the move is motivated by the need to fulfil the growing demand of its over 80 million users, with a primary focus on modernising infrastructure and establishing a clear path to cloud adoption.
The MTN executive underlined that the telco's continued efforts to drive digital transformation were evident in the first half of the year, with the company raising more than $5 billion in its results, a significant milestone for an African company, he said.
As part of its defined modernisation plan, the business will use a variety of Red Hat products.
Odo went on to assert that the telco is laser-focussed on the automation of operational artificial intelligence (AI), citing its widespread use across industries.
“We are very much interested in having a discussion around the AI and understanding that it will be available after reviews, so we will have it,” he noted.
The company will be also adopting the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 1O, a major update focused on integrating AI capabilities, strengthening security, and modernising operating system management for hybrid cloud environments.
This follows the successful deployment and migration of over 70% of its workload to an earlier version of RHEL within four months without any downtime and service disruptions, highlighted Odo.
“we're going to deploy and adopt the RHEL 10 to take advantage of the latest enterprise security, performance and stability that are bound on real time,” said Odo.
Also, the telco sees the Openshift platform as a game changer in its modernisation efforts, citing the fact that it provides MTN with a single unified platform for both traditional vector machines and containerised apps.
Furthermore, Odo stated that MTN has an ambitious aim of transferring 50% of its workloads to the Openshift Container Platform by the end of this year, which is a scalable and hybrid cloud strategy, and that he sees the automation platform (Ansible) as the unifying element.
He commented: “We now have the flexibility to scale on demand, and that is what we have used, and finally, the glue that holds it together is the automation platform; we automate daily to ensure that we eliminate errors and mistakes of engineers.”
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