Porsche Informatik drives user experience with Red Hat OpenShift

Porsche Informatik has been shaping tomorrow’s automotive business for more than 50 years. Recognizing end-user experience as a critical success factor in the digital era, the automotive software specialist realized that it needed to ensure scalability and accelerate innovation. Red Hat OpenShift allows the company to deploy new software more frequently and ensure availability across its connected car process, mobility as a service process, traditional retail process, apps and more. Red Hat partner Dynatrace ensures the end-to-end visibility of performance.

Benefits:

• Improved agility to enable a 90% reduction in time-to-market
• Enabled DevOps for more frequent deployments 
• Enhanced scalability for a great customer experience
• Gained end-to-end visibility of performance with Dynatrace

Porsche Informatik is part of Porsche Holdings Salzburg, the largest automotive trading company in Europe with a revenue of roughly 22 billion Euros. With 160 solutions in 32 countries on four continents, millions of users depend on its software every day. Porsche Informatik sees itself as a trendsetter and an innovation driver, with 800 specialists shaping the digitalization of the automotive trade. 

“There are several megatrends shaping our future: connected cars, autonomous driving, the shared economy, electric cars, and of course, digitalization,” said Manfred Immitzer, Managing Director and Chief Digital Officer at Porsche Informatik. “As a market leader, we want to utilize these trends to shape the way forward.” 

Porsche Informatik’s open source strategy for tailor-made applications creates a clear competitive advantage. “Software needs cloud infrastructure to be scalable,” said Immitzer. “And with that scalability, we can ensure availability and a great end-user experience. End-user experience is one of the key success factors in the digital era.”

Moreover, one of the biggest promises that Porsche Informatik made to its customers was to reduce the time-to-market by 90%. “We need to be very fast to assemble a connected car process, a mobility as a service process, or a traditional retail process,” said Immitzer. To achieve this, Porsche Informatik decided to migrate from a monolithic environment towards a modular landscape based on containers and Kubernetes in a hybrid cloud architecture. 

Porsche Informatik established a private cloud hosted by datacenter provider eww ITandTEL, utilizing Red Hat OpenShift for a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environment. “We bet on the right horse early in deciding to implement Red Hat OpenShift, predicting that Kubernetes would become the de facto standard for Linux container development,” said Christian Köberl, Software Architect at Porsche Informatik. “Red Hat OpenShift is one of the best enterprise solutions when it comes to authorization, authentication, logging, and metrics, among other things.”

With help from eww ITandTEL and a Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), the organization migrated to Red Hat OpenShift running on-premise in its datacenter in just six weeks. The platform now hosts development processes across thousands of containers on 75 nodes, used regularly by more than 350 developers. It orchestrates the end-customer applications, establishing containers so the cloud can access the surrounding systems of the legacy applications. 

Porsche Informatik realized that to maintain its market lead, it also needed a fundamentally different approach to performance monitoring and management. After evaluating the market, it selected Red Hat partner Dynatrace because it offered native support for Red Hat OpenShift while providing complete visibility into every layer of the IT environment.

Improved agility to enable a 90% reduction in time-to-market

With a modular architecture enabled by Red Hat OpenShift, the company has gained the agility it needs to innovate faster and work towards its goal of reducing time-to-market for new software by 90%. 

Enabled DevOps for more frequent deployments

Red Hat OpenShift offers a DevOps environment with excellent integration with the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. New solutions can be provided much more frequently compared to legacy applications.

Enhanced scalability for a great customer experience

Red Hat OpenShift has enhanced scalability. With that scalability, Porsche Informatik can ensure availability and, ultimately, a great end-user experience.

Gained end-to-end visibility of performance with Dynatrace

Tightly integrated Dynatrace tools give visibility on the end-to-end performance of the Red Hat OpenShift cloud environment, including real-time visibility on the experience of customers using apps, e-commerce platforms, and web services.

After successfully adopting Red Hat OpenShift complemented by automated monitoring from Dynatrace, Porsche Informatik continues to expand its use of its Red Hat and Dynatrace technologies to accelerate innovation as a market leader in the automotive sector.

“With the scalability that Red Hat OpenShift and Dynatrace give us, we can confidently drive digitation forward in our sector,” said Immitzer. “We look forward to continuing to shape the way forward with Red Hat and Dynatrace at our side.”