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NEW DELHI: Canonical, the distributor of the open-source operating system (OS) Ubuntu, said it is transforming the telecom industry’s infrastructure by driving the adoption of secure open-source solutions.
“We have moved up the chain. Customers and partners are now using the Canonical stack for virtualisation and abstraction. There are now Kubernetes container and orchestration solutions,” Naeem Maver, Vice President (Asia Pacific), Canonical Ubuntu, said at the second-edition of the recently concluded ETTelecom 5G Innovation Summit 2025.
Canonical provides carrier-grade open-source for telecom carriers, from cloud to edge. Ubuntu is the standard securely designed Linux for telco workloads running on servers and virtual machines. It is also widely tested on the world’s leading silicon to optimise resource consumption.
Canonical enables telcos to build their own cloud and use powerful automation tools to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO). Many telcos choose “Canonical OpenStack” for data centers or “Microcloud” for small private clouds and edge environments. Running on top of both, Canonical Kubernetes provides repeatable and trusted deployment and operations of CNFs (container network functions).
Canonical has collaborated with leading silicon vendors, including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Arm, Intel and Nvidia, to fine-tune solutions for 5G, edge computing and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML).
According to the company, “Ubuntu Pro” is a trusted way to consume open source software that is securely maintained. For telcos, this means keeping infrastructure secure from common vulnerabilities, thanks to the regular, fast updates and patches. It delivers OS hardening and auditing with automated tooling, and compliance for a wide range of standards.
Canonical supports a wide ecosystem of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and Cloud-native Network Functions (CNFs) that have validated their compatibility with our cloud infrastructure, built on Ubuntu, Canonical OpenStack, and Canonical Kubernetes.
Canonical has partnerships across core, radio access network (RAN), and OSS/BSS with Indian as well as multinational telcos, and also works with IT companies for virtualisation and abstraction functions.
Canonical’s PartnerCloud NF Vendor Self-Certification Program enables software OEM vendors to test and optimise their network functions across diverse, production-grade cloud environments.
Ubuntu is the Linux-driven alternative to Windows, which is a proprietary OS developed and licensed by Microsoft. Both operating systems serve the consumer and enterprise customers.
Ubuntu, however, is said to be more suitable for specific applications in data centers, the Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud environments.
Ubuntu is one of the leading Linux distributions globally. It is used in 47% of OpenStack deployments according to the latest OpenStack user survey. It is also one of the most popular operating systems for containers, with nearly a billion docker image pulls per year. Ubuntu also has a large share of the hyperscaler market and is preferred by over 40% of IoT developers, making it a leader across the compute spectrum, the top executive said.
The open-source market in India’s telecom sector is expected to grow at approximately 20% between 2025 and 2030, Maver said.
Ubuntu adoption in India, by contrast, is growing at a faster pace at 60% year-on-year, as per the company.
Maver believes the growth could explode, driven by India’s adoption of open-source to hedge itself against geopolitical tension-driven risks. “Our governments do not want us to be in a position where we are held ransom on the technology that we are deploying. Hence, open source becomes an easy answer for that.”
- Published On Sep 25, 2025 at 04:09 PM IST
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