Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Takes Digital Innovation into the Fast Lane with Major European Automaker

Enterprise container platform drives IT innovation at the BMW Group for faster application development and a smoother customer experience

BOSTON – RED HAT SUMMIT 2017 – MAY 3, 2017 -

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that BMW Group, the world’s leading premium manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles, has deployed Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to support its delivery of business applications and services. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is used by enterprises like BMW Group to embrace innovation, speed application development and time-to-market and gain more flexibility to scale services on-demand.

Icon-Red_Hat-Media_and_documents-Quotemark_Open-B-Red-RGB

The BMW Group shows just how an organization can embrace agile methodologies and modern container technologies to deliver business value and an enhanced customer experience.

Ashesh Badani

vice president and general manager, OpenShift, Red Hat

In the competitive automotive industry, IT infrastructure does not only support internal functions such as development and manufacturing, but it also has to enable the delivery of digital services addressing the heightened customer expectations regarding reliability and performance. A majority of customers interact directly with the BMW Group through its IT services. Almost all cars the BMW Group ships are delivered with BMW ConnectedDrive, the company’s digital product that connects the driver and vehicle with a range of services and apps that provide the driver with vehicle-related information, assistance and entertainment during journeys or allows them to remotely access the vehicle.

The BMW Group currently hosts more than 1,000 web-based apps, showing the growing demand for discoverable, easy-to-use application hubs. This growth highlights a major need for many enterprises: scaling existing applications and services dynamically to meet demand while bringing new innovations to market faster. Traditional enterprise architectures are often monolithic in nature, which can struggle to handle the dynamic needs of modern workloads. This has led many global businesses to seek more flexible application infrastructure that embraces more agile development and IT operations methodology, including continuous delivery, continuous integration and extensive automation.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is the first and only container-centric, hybrid cloud solution built from Linux containers and the Kubernetes, Project Atomic and OpenShift Origin upstream projects and based on the trusted backbone of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform provides a more secure, stable platform for container-based deployments without sacrificing current IT investments, allowing for mission-critical, traditional applications to coexist alongside new, cloud-native and container-based applications.

With its developers preferring to use industry-standard technologies, the BMW Group valued Red Hat’s extensive contributions to both the docker and Kubernetes projects and its enterprise-ready version of these technologies. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform also supports multiple public clouds, allowing for the exploration of hybrid cloud strategies while maintaining applications that are independent of underlying infrastructure, allowing for organizations like the BMW Group to choose the technology that most closely delivers on its needs at any moment in time. Additionally, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform’s streamlined integration with existing technology stacks preserves existing investments while enabling faster moves to a modern cloud-native runtime environment.

BMW ConnectedDrive is subject to large fluctuations in service requests, depending on the time of day, weather conditions, traffic incidents and other factors. After the decomposition of traditional applications into microservices running on containers, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform enables the BMW Group to do point scaling to adjust loads to peaks and troughs in demand and to deliver the continuous service that today’s consumers expect.

The BMW Group has initially rolled out Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in its Germany-based enterprise datacenter, focused on supporting ConnectedDrive.

Supporting Quote
Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift, Red Hat
“The BMW Group shows just how an organization can embrace agile methodologies and modern container technologies to deliver business value and an enhanced customer experience. We are pleased to support a leader in automotive innovation as it grows its technological prowess and innovation capabilities to offer services faster and more reliably. Seeing a business streamline the application development process, from creation to deployment, is key to enterprise-level digital transformation and a trend that we hope to see more and more, especially as other organizations follow the example of trailblazers like the BMW Group.”

Additional Resources

Connect with Red Hat

  • About Red Hat
  • Red Hat is the world's leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As a connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.



  • Forward-Looking Statements
  • Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the ability of the Company to compete effectively; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; delays or reductions in information technology spending; the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; fluctuations in exchange rates; the effects of industry consolidation; uncertainty and adverse results in litigation and related settlements; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; changes in and a dependence on key personnel; the ability to meet financial and operational challenges encountered in our international operations; and ineffective management of, and control over, the Company's growth and international operations, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission's website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations". In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic and political conditions, governmental and public policy changes and the impact of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company's views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.