Digital services provider Opitz Consulting (Opitz) needed a technology partner to help it offer an enterprise-level Kubernetes solution. Opitz customers considering Red Hat OpenShift wanted a certified Red Hat partner to support their business. The Red Hat partnership provides Opitz with training and early access to change notifications along with essential networking opportunities. Thanks to its partnership with Red Hat, Opitz is well positioned to grow.

Benefits

• Expanded networking opportunities with Red Hat
• Gained access to vital resources
• Helped customers innovate faster

Opitz Consulting

Founded in 1990 under the name TRIGON Society for Organization and Project Management GmbH, digital services provider Opitz Consulting helps organizations across Germany master the challenges of digitization. 

More than 500 consultants based in ten locations in Germany and Poland combine their technical expertise with experience in holistic strategies, change, and agility to develop the best solutions for their customers. 

“Historically, we had a strong partnership with a leading integration architecture provider,” said Stefan Kühnlein, Senior Solutions Architect at Opitz. “But that partner halted its on-premise integration platform, and our customers were moving to the cloud. That meant a significant change for our business, so we began looking for other partnerships that would align with our evolving business.”

An enterprise-level Kubernetes solution

Many of Opitz’s customers, including customers in highly-regulated industries, were already satisfied Red Hat customers. “Our customers were running Red Hat Enterprise LinuxⓇ,” said Richard Attermeyer, Solution Architect at Opitz. “And many were thinking about running Kubernetes clusters. If they wanted to run it on-premises rather than as a managed service, it was quite natural to look at Red Hat offerings.” As Opitz’s customers changed their strategy to Red Hat OpenShift they wanted to work with a certified Red Hat partner.

Opitz became a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner in 2018. The two companies work closely together to help customers architect and develop microservices solutions built and deployed on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. “We decided to become a Red Hat partner to help our customers migrate their monolithic applications into microservices in the cloud,” said Attermeyer. “We wanted to offer them professional enterprise-level support for their Kubernetes clusters and their Red Hat OpenShift implementations.” 

While some Opitz customers have an on-premises or a hybrid Kubernetes solution, others have a public cloud one, either in Azure or in Amazon Web Services (AWS). In addition to its partnership with Red Hat, Opitz has also formed partnerships with AWS and Microsoft.

Building an orchestration platform

Red Hat OpenShift provides the foundation for the OpenDevStack platform built by Opitz in collaboration with pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim. OpenDevStack provides an orchestration layer that gives developers a quick start and ensures continuous delivery for highly regulated industries, such as pharmaceuticals.

OpenDevStack helps developers get their first code running on Red Hat OpenShift. A provisioning application lets them choose the type of application they want, then sets up all the resources required on Red Hat OpenShift. “We create the project build configurations: a Jenkins pipeline build, the Atlassian suite, and a BitBucket project,” said Attermeyer. “Your code gets compiled on Red Hat OpenShift, deployed on Red Hat OpenShift, and you’re ready to go.” 

Customers are using OpenDevStack to build a wide variety of applications to run on Red Hat OpenShift, and Opitz is working with them at different levels. “We have one customer running data analytics on a large Red Hat OpenShift installation,” said Attermeyer, “and we have others running backend processes. It’s diverse.” While some customers are building new applications on Red Hat OpenShift, others are migrating existing monolithic applications to a microservices architecture.

Providing the robust technology customers are demanding

Expanded networking opportunities with Red Hat

The Red Hat Advanced Business Partner Program provides regular networking opportunities, and these play an essential role in helping Opitz grow its business. “The Red Hat partner community has really helped us expand our network,” said Attermeyer. “We are now getting into some great discussions with other partners and talking to potential clients about what we can do for them.”

The networking effect helps Opitz identify great opportunities for partnering with other Red Hat partners. “We can help each other out,” said Attermeyer. Opitz has, for instance, spoken with one partner that focuses on managing Red Hat OpenShift clusters but is not big in consulting around DevOps processes—an area where Opitz has a great deal of expertise.

Gained access to vital resources

As a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, Opitz receives early notification of any changes that are being planned for Red Hat OpenShift, and more. “Having access to the Red Hat OpenShift back database along with learning materials is invaluable,” said Attermeyer.

“It’s nice to have access to resources on Partner Content Hub,” said Kühnlein, “ so we can help our customers understand the benefits of using Red Hat OpenShift.”

Helped customers innovate faster

Red Hat OpenShift has been instrumental for Opitz customers to improve productivity and innovate faster. “Our customers are finding they can bring new products and services to market faster, thanks to the combination of OpenDevStack and Red Hat OpenShift,” said Attermeyer. 

While Red Hat OpenShift provides a robust and reliable container platform, OpenDevStack provides the orchestration layer that sits on top, ensuring standardization across projects while integrating components and, as Attermeyer said, “managing the entire process from provisioning a new project to running on Red Hat OpenShift.”

Aligning with evolving customer needs

Opitz foresees a long and fruitful partnership with Red Hat. Attermeyer expects it to expand from the current focus on Red Hat OpenShift to Red Hat development and integration products. “Red Hat products that are development-related and integration-related are of interest to us,” he said. “Our customers are moving away from the big platforms to the lightweight enterprise service buses such as Camel K, and looking for enterprise solutions and support in those areas.”

Identity and access management is also a growing area for Opitz. “We also see a lot of customers adopting Keycloak,” said Kühnlein. “Identity and access management can truly benefit from Red Hat innovation, so Red Hat Single Sign-On is going to be of interest to us too.” 

Kühnlein concluded by emphasizing the critical nature of the Red Hat partnership. “We are at the beginning of a good partnership with Red Hat,”said Kühnlein. “We only see it strengthening in the future as our customers increasingly look to Red Hat solutions to solve their business problems.”

About Opitz Consulting

Digital services provider Opitz Consulting (Opitz) helps organizations across Germany master the challenges of digitization. Its broad technological expertise spans software development and integration, big data and analytics, cloud, and infrastructure. More than 500 colleagues reside in ten locations in Germany and Poland.