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.
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.
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
- Red Hat OpenShift
- Red Hat OpenStack Platform
- Red Hat JBoss® Enterprise Application Platform
- Red Hat Consulting
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.”
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.
Additional customer stories
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.
