Valencia City Council Pioneers e-Government with Red Hat

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Valencia City Council enhances its e-government capabilities with Red Hat to better serve its citizens with digital public services. With Red Hat OpenShift, the industry's leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, the Council has saved more than 4,000 work hours, shortened application deployment times and reduced Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions by almost 5 metric tonnes.

Valencia is the third most populated city in Spain, with more than 800,000 inhabitants, and is the center of a large metropolitan area with more than 1.5 million citizens. The Valencia City Council engages with residents through the municipal website and the Municipal Electronic Office, the platform that provides Valencians with access to council information, services and electronic processes, as well as other council-dependent offices and management services.

The City of Valencia strives to provide quality digital services for its residents and is on a mission to make sure digital channels are citizens’ and companies’ preferred method of communication with the administration. In 2014, it launched a digitization initiative to become a leader in e-government and smart city management. This process was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic to improve efficiency and meet the needs of the citizens more quickly. The Information and Communication Technologies Service team (SerTIC) of the Council explored various technological options to help manage the increasing volume and variety of digital public services. After testing container platforms from various vendors, Red Hat OpenShift was the solution that offered the technical support and automation capabilities that Valencia City Council needed to meet its digitization goals. 

Red Hat OpenShift’s automation, orchestration and self-service capabilities helped the Valencia City Council save more than 4,000 hours of work previously spent on repetitive IT administration tasks, increase the team's overall productivity and focus on more strategic projects. Applying DevOps principles with the help of Red Hat OpenShift, the SerTIC team develops projects as interdisciplinary, collaborative initiatives that involve all teams. Applications that previously took weeks to deploy can now be deployed in five minutes or less.

Before adopting Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Training and Certification trained the SerTIC team to familiarize them with the OpenShift Web Console, integration and production cluster installations and proof of concepts in application deployments. This enabled them to deploy Red Hat OpenShift on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-premise more quickly and without disruption to the services being used by citizens. With this centralized infrastructure supporting both back-end development environments and services tailored to the different departments of the City Council of Valencia, SerTIC can provide advanced personalisation in digital services to a wider segment of citizens more quickly and effectively.

As a result of this modernisation, Valencia City Council achieved cost savings and a reduction in its carbon footprint. Leveraging Red Hat OpenShift gave the Council the ability to have multiple applications hosted on a single server, decreasing its budget for the purchase of servers by 62.5% from €136,658 for eight servers in 2021 to €51,247 for three servers in 2022. This decrease in servers has resulted in a saving of 10 million watts in energy consumption and prevented 4.78 tonnes of CO2 from being emitted in one year.

Supporting Quotes

Julia Bernal, country manager for Spain and Portugal, Red Hat 

"It is exciting to be part of the technological modernisation of a public administration such as the Valencia City Council. With Red Hat OpenShift, the City Council of Valencia has the agility, flexibility and speed needed to provide digital services to citizens. This digital transformation has brought the public administration closer to Valencians while also enabling the SerTIC team to work in an efficient and agile way, providing civil servants with quality digital services at their disposal, and reducing the city’s carbon footprint."

Francisco Javier Martínez Cervera, head of the Systems Office of the Information and Communication Technologies Service (SerTIC) of the Valencia City Council 

"Thanks to Red Hat OpenShift we have moved from a manual system to an automated system with auto-scaling capabilities. Now the City Council of Valencia has the ability to design and implement new digital services with agility, speed and efficiency. In addition, we have the technology to be able to respond to specific campaigns aimed at citizens and measure the volume of interactions with the digital administration without interrupting digital public services."