Vodafone Oman picks Red Hat

Vodafone Oman is moving its information-technology backbone onto Red Hat’s cloud platform as it pushes more of its network and software operations into automation. (redhat.com) Red Hat said on March 2, 2026 that Vodafone Oman plans to standardize on Red Hat OpenShift, with a target of moving 100% of production workloads onto the platform by 2028. More than 60% of Vodafone Oman’s production environment already runs on OpenShift, according to Red Hat. (redhat.com) OpenShift is software for running applications and virtual machines on one common layer, instead of keeping older systems and newer cloud software in separate stacks. Vodafone Oman said it is using OpenShift Virtualization and Red Hat’s migration tools to bring those workloads together over the coming months. (redhat.com) Vodafone Oman launched operations in late 2021 and officially launched in March 2022 as Oman’s third licensed mobile network. Red Hat said the operator has since passed one million subscribers on its 5G network. (timesofoman.com, redhat.com) The operator has been built around an asset-light model, which means it leans on shared or leased infrastructure instead of owning every tower, fiber link, and legacy system itself. Ookla said Vodafone Oman leased tower capacity from Oman Tower Company, used Ooredoo’s network for 4G services, and leased fiber from Oman Broadband. (ookla.com) That operating model has helped Vodafone Oman grow quickly in a market long dominated by Omantel and Ooredoo. A GSMA case study said Vodafone Oman reached 12% subscriber share within two years, while Telecom Lead reported one million users and more than 98% population coverage by May 2025. (gsma.com, telecomlead.com) For telecom operators, the appeal of this kind of platform is less hardware and fewer separate software silos. Red Hat said Vodafone Oman is using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management and Ansible Automation Platform to improve automation, observability, and day-to-day operations. (redhat.com) Vodafone Oman has also shifted its primary production environment onto OpenShift running on bare metal, meaning directly on physical servers rather than through another software layer. Red Hat said that setup is intended to cut latency and improve resource use for demanding services. (redhat.com) The next step is not another consumer launch but a slower back-end rebuild: finish the workload migration, automate more operations, and keep adding capacity without abandoning the low-asset model that helped Vodafone Oman scale from launch to a million 5G users. (redhat.com, zawya.com)