Fran Heeran, who headed up the Product and Engineering unit within Nokia’s Cloud and Network Services group, has been recruited by Red Hat to head up its global telecommunications business.
Heeran, who is styled VP Global Telecommunications at cloud OS player Red Hat, was in charge of fronting up the deal in mid-2023 that saw Nokia offload its cloud infrastructure assets, and people, to Red Hat. At that time, Nokia said it did not want to be in the business of supporting and maintaining the proliferating underlying hardware and cloud infrastructure on which its network and services software runs. Instead, it wanted its customers to port from Nokia cloud solutions to Red Hat platforms.
The deal would give Red Hat many telco customers, if they agreed to move over to Red Hat, rather than seek another cloud alternative.
But Red Hat’s Chris McBrayne, Vice President, Global Enterprise Sales, said that Heeran’s appointment is a “not tied to Nokia’s Cloud Infrastructure portfolio transition.”
McBrayne said, “While we worked with Fran during our collaboration with Nokia, we greatly value his 25 years of telecommunications expertise and his role at Red Hat is independent, focused on driving open source innovation for service providers.”
Certainly a VP Telecommunications role looks bigger than being a de facto in-hire to run only the acquired Nokia’s cloud infrastructure business. And McBrayne concurred, saying “This role is about scaling Red Hat’s telco vision and strategy within the industry and the wider enterprise space by closely collaborating with Red Hat’s communities, customers and partners.”
In a Red Hat blog post heralding his new role, Heeran said that he saw “a massive opportunity in front of us as dynamics within the industry shift.”
He called out the need for flexible, scaleable and automated infrastructure to support emerging workloads like artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (gen AI) in the telecommunications and industrial sectors.
He also said that Red Hat’s partner ecosystem could be “a key driver in helping CSPs and manufacturers successfully implement AI at the edge and begin the evolution to future communications technology generations.”
Further, he identified a need fo these deployments to have a consistent platform that can work across a diverse range of vendors to aggregate and manage data and fuel AI-enabled applications from the datacenter to the cloud and at the farthest edge.
Red Hat also confirmed that Heeran is the like for like replacement for Darrell Jordan-Smith, who left for competitor Wind River at the start of 2024. Jordan-Smith fronted up the Nokia cloud infrastructure deal for Red Hat alongside Heeran in media briefings at the time.
Jordan-Smith had been styled Senior Vice President, Telecommunications, Media and Entertainment & Edge. Heeran’s position sees a slight change in nomenclature, then, with the focus on the Telco end of that list of business areas, and Media, Entertainment & Edge dropping off.
Nokia confirmed that Heeran left his post in the summer. He had been leading the Product and Engineering unit [which contains Core operations] within Nokia’s Cloud and Network Services business groups since January. Prior to that he was SVP, Core Networks, having initially joined Nokia from Vodafone where he had headed up NFV and cloud initiatives.
He has been replaced as Senior Vice President, Product and Engineering, Cloud & Network Services, by Kal De. De’s LinkedIn profile states that he joined Nokia in April 2024, and lists stints with Vista Equity Partners, VMWare, Mirantis, Docker, HPE and Oracle.
