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When Vodafone New Zealand separated from the Vodafone Group to become One New Zealand (One NZ), it faced an opportunity to go beyond a mere rebrand. Like many telecommunications providers, One NZ faced a 2-stack challenge as it managed legacy virtual machines (VMs) alongside modern containerized applications. To support its long-term digital ambitions, it launched the C1 Program, a telco core modernization project that aimed to build a unified, future-ready foundation. The goal was to standardize telco applications on a common platform that could accelerate business outcomes without vendor constraints.
Strategic, not reactionary
For One NZ, the move to Red Hat OpenShift was a calculated architectural decision. In an interview conducted with IDC Program Vice President Jim Mercer, One NZ Principal Architect of Cloud and Infrastructure Umer Younis emphasized the deliberate nature of this choice. “This was not a reaction to industry changes,” he said. “It was a deliberate strategic move to build the horizontal cloud platform for One NZ.”
By selecting Red Hat OpenShift, One NZ positioned itself to take advantage of a mature ecosystem that would support its automation-first and cloud-agnostic principles, avoiding vendor lock-in.
A gradual migration approach
Moving from a legacy virtualized environment to a Kubernetes-native platform requires precision and scale. To achieve this, One NZ adopted Red Hat Consulting: Virtual Migration Factory framework.
Working with Red Hat Consulting, One NZ established a repeatable, automated factory model to accelerate VM migrations that combined the migration toolkit for virtualization and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Workloads were tagged as simple, medium, or hard based on storage size and integration requirements. After workloads were evaluated, less than 5% of applications were classified as hard. The One NZ team worked with Red Hat Professional Services for the initial assessment and solution design, and now independently manages migrations at scale.
Changing the mindset
“From One NZ’s perspective, the biggest challenge was not the technology itself. It was the mindset change,” Umer told IDC.
To help accelerate this change, One NZ partnered with its account team to invest in “learning squads” and acceleration programs for its engineering and DevOps teams. By partnering with Red Hat for upskilling, it equipped its existing teams to manage the new stack. Today, the same team that manages the incumbent virtualization platform also handles the OpenShift environment, extending their existing expertise to a modern container-based infrastructure.
Long-term modernization with a horizontal cloud
The move to OpenShift Virtualization has allowed One NZ to manage VMs and containers on equal footing. This convergence has unlocked significant operational benefits including:
- Unified operations: One NZ now applies the same automation, observability, and policy frameworks across both VM and container workloads.
- Faster time to market: Major upgrades that once took months of planning and execution are now completed in weeks or even days.
- Resource efficiency: By consolidating workloads onto improved hardware fabrics, One NZ is increasing consolidation ratios per worker node and optimizing power consumption.
Learn more
One New Zealand’s journey demonstrates that virtualization doesn’t have to be a legacy anchor. By integrating VMs into a modern application platform, organizations can unify operations and accelerate their digital future.
