Swisscom Guides Customers into the Digital Age with Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Virtualization

New environment enables leading Swiss service provider to deliver fast, reliable and innovative cloud services across its business and customer base

BARCELONA - OPENSTACK SUMMIT -

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Swisscom has selected Red Hat as its technology partner to help the company deliver a modern, agile, and highly scalable cloud platform. Deploying Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Virtualization as the basis of its new cloud infrastructure, Swisscom has been able to develop and deliver new digital products faster and more efficiently.

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

Red Hat OpenStack Platform enables us to take our cloud strategy one step further, helping us to be flexible in multiple senses. We can scale up and down our clusters; we can fully automate our deployments; and we have limited our downtime when we make changes in production."

Marco Hochstrasser

head of Cloud Platform Development, Swisscom

Swisscom, a leading telecoms provider in Switzerland and one of its leading IT companies, is headquartered in Ittigen, close to the Swiss capital city, Bern. Customers such as Swiss Re and Dorma Kaba, use Swisscom’s cloud services to develop and build their software.

To help maintain a leading position while supporting a growing customer base looking to benefit from new and emerging digital services, Swisscom wanted to expand its cloud offerings. It required a technology platform that could provide the flexibility needed to support ongoing innovation and development – across both its own organization and customer base.

Recognizing that Red Hat OpenStack Platform offers a highly scalable, open, and production-ready Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, the organization chose Red Hat as its preferred technology partner. Co-engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and backed by Red Hat's enterprise support lifecycle, Red Hat OpenStack Platform offers an open foundation for scalable cloud deployments. Red Hat OpenStack Platform now provides the infrastructure foundation needed for Swisscom’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Offering flexible bandwidth based on workloads, Swisscom is helping to simplify rapid prototyping and agile development, while offering a self-service environment to Swisscom’s customers to develop their own applications.

While an open source environment was a key factor in Swisscom’s decision, so too was Red Hat’s ecosystem expertise. Swisscom recognized Red Hat’s contributions to the upstream OpenStack community, and worked with Red Hat Consulting to gain access to upstream and downstream expertise, as well as Red Hat’s leadership in delivering a production-ready OpenStack platform for hundreds of organizations around the world.

In addition to selecting Red Hat OpenStack Platform to deliver its cloud platform, Swisscom also uses Red Hat Virtualization. This solution uses the same KVM-based virtualization technology found in Red Hat OpenStack Platform, meaning that the same team can manage the environments and Swisscom can achieve more consistency. With both Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Virtualization, Swisscom can now more easily scale its clusters up and down on-demand and fully automate deployments, all while limiting downtime during production changes. It can also increase platform density, hosting different customer workloads on the same cluster and platform.

As a result of the size and flexible cloud computing capacity offered by Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Swisscom has created new offerings. One example is MyCloud, a new cloud application that is designed to offer unlimited storage for residential customers. The application is developed, hosted and managed on Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

Supporting Quotes

Marco Hochstrasser, head of Cloud Platform Development, Swisscom

“Our mission at Swisscom is to give every citizen in Switzerland a piece of the cloud, and we are one of the first service providers in Europe to launch a publicly available, commercial cloud offering at the scale we have. Red Hat OpenStack Platform enables us to take our cloud strategy one step further, helping us to be flexible in multiple senses. We can scale up and down our clusters; we can fully automate our deployments; and we have limited our downtime when we make changes in production. As a result, we are proud to say we now have organizations outside of Switzerland using our solution.”

Stephan Massalt, vice president of Cloud, Swisscom

“Swisscom is committed to guiding our customers into the digital age. Being a partner for us really means that you’re engaged in the way we build our solutions, how we offer them to our customers, and how we develop them in the future. Red Hat is a pivotal partner in this mission.”

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat

“As a consumer of telecoms and IT services I have come to expect access to innovative applications. As a technologist I can appreciate the challenges faced by operators such as Swisscom in terms of bringing those new services to market. It is, therefore, gratifying to see the flexibility and scalability of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Virtualization being used to help bring innovative new services to market.”

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; 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; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company's growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, 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.