SUCCESS STORY

The key to happier Cisco customers? Higher IT productivity.

Overview

To keep pace with customer demand, Cisco, a leading provider of networking solutions, must quickly deliver new IT products and solutions. The challenge is to keep its IT team engaged and productive to fuel innovation. With help from Red Hat, Cisco built its Lightweight Application Environment (LAE), which runs on Red Hat® OpenShift Container Platform, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology formerly known as OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat. Now provisioning times have gone from months to minutes, and the Cisco IT team can focus on strategic initiatives.


Icon-Red_Hat-Media_and_documents-Quotemark_Open-B-Red-RGB Having a strategic, forward-thinking partner like Red Hat that aligns with all of our priorities is a key part of Cisco’s success. We’re thankful to have Red Hat as our partner.

Michael White

I.T. Architect, Cisco

Challenge

Use data insights to save lives

Cisco’s success depends on its ability to quickly deliver innovative IT products and solutions to customers. Delays can cost the company business. To encourage speed to market and improve satisfaction, Cisco needed to keep its 1,000+ developers fully engaged in designing and building applications and guard against high employee turnover, low productivity, and slow response times.

Solution

Build a 1-stop shopping catalog

Cisco turned to Red Hat to design and build its LAE, a PaaS deployment that supports hundreds of apps that power a variety of business functions. The solution gives developers a self-service portal they can use to order the IT resources they need to develop apps, eliminating manual provisioning. “It’s a 1-stop shopping catalog … making the ordering process seamless and easier for developers to use,” said Sudha Agrahara, IT manager at Cisco.

Software & Services

Hardware

  • Cisco UCS servers
  • Cisco networking equipment
  • NetApp storage

Business Outcome

Move from months to minutes for faster innovation

Cisco developers used to wait as long as 3 months for projects to be provisioned. “[Now] the developers push a button and the service is delivered within a matter of … minutes,” said Agrahara. More productivity means customers get innovative products and services faster. The solution reduces demands on limited IT resources and gives developers more time to focus on creative projects, increasing employee satisfaction. “Having a strategic, forward-thinking partner like Red Hat that aligns with all of our priorities is a key part of Cisco’s success,” said Michael White, IT architect at Cisco. “We’re thankful to have Red Hat as our partner.”

Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift

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Related resources

Datasheet

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

This datasheet provides product details about Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform—open to any application, team, or infrastructure.

Analyst material

Value of Red Hat solutions versus non-paid alternatives

This whitepaper offers findings from IDC's research on using Red Hat solutions as opposed to non-paid open source alternatives. Read the study.

Red Hat Innovators in the Open

Open source fuels innovation. This fact is exemplified best by Red Hat’s customers, who are using open source technologies to change the game. We’re proud to call them "innovators in the open" and share their stories.