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Red Hat Powers a Fully Open, Massively-Scalable Private Cloud for Insurance Australia Group with Red Hat OpenStack Platform

IAG improves customer experience, modernizes legacy infrastructure with Red Hat’s flexible OpenStack technologies

SYDNEY – OpenStack Summit Sydney 2017 - —

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Insurance Australia Group Limited (IAG) is using Red Hat OpenStack Platform to help consolidate and simplify its legacy infrastructure. A trusted partner of IAG for seven years, Red Hat is now helping IAG use the power of open source technology to bring together disparate data sources into a single, scalable private cloud solution to improve customer experience.

Enterprises faced with the requirements of a software-centric and on-demand user base can struggle to adapt their legacy infrastructure into something more agile to more effectively meet the evolving customer needs. By adopting Red Hat OpenStack Platform to serve as the scalable, flexible foundation for its infrastructure, IAG has set itself on the path towards digital transformation by using innovative, open, and enterprise-ready technology to help bring new services to its customer base.

Radhesh Balakrishnan

general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat

IAG is the parent company of a general insurance group with controlled operations in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Its businesses underwrite over $11.4 billion AUD of premium per annum, selling insurance under many leading brands to consumers and enterprises. Given the size and scale of the company, IAG used more than 400 servers housed in 23 data warehouses across nine core technologies and on three separate platforms to power everyday operations. This system was increasingly difficult to manage, producing problems ranging from delays in bringing new services online to complex, manual processes. Customer information was also not able to be used effectively for business decisions across the entirety of the corporation. In an effort to simplify and streamline its disparate data sources and improve overall operations, IAG decided to overhaul its infrastructure, moving from a complex legacy system to a more flexible cloud-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

IAG selected Red Hat OpenStack Platform for its massive scalability and flexibility, aiming to help improve the customer experience through digital enablement even as the company grows. Red Hat OpenStack Platform delivers a single view of customer operations on a reliable private cloud platform, built on the enterprise-grade backbone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The platform is also designed to provide IAG the agility to better scale and more quickly meet customer demand without compromising availability, performance or IT security requirements. The addition of automation capabilities through Red Hat Ansible better optimizes application migration, improving current processes across IAG’s organization. Working with Red Hat Consulting through the initial deployment process provided IAG with hands-on expert support and training during the migration, and also delivered ongoing support for IAG’s new Red Hat-based cloud infrastructure as needed.

Red Hat is an OpenStack leader - both in contributions to the upstream OpenStack community and its work to deliver a production-ready OpenStack platform to enterprise customers. Red Hat OpenStack Platform has emerged as the open source cloud platform of choice for a growing number of global organizations. By co-engineering with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, organizations can deploy OpenStack on a tested, reliable, and more secure foundation, backed by Red Hat’s award-winning enterprise support.

A year later, IAG’s scalable, simplified cloud infrastructure stack based on Red Hat’s technologies has enabled IAG to experience reduced deployment time of new services from quarters to days and has enabled the company to connect data sources for greater visibility into customers’ needs. As of October, IAG has even open-sourced its first application using the new platform to power this work. The company plans to use this same base platform to help simplify additional business operations.

Supporting Quotes
Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat
“Enterprises faced with the requirements of a software-centric and on-demand user base can struggle to adapt their legacy infrastructure into something more agile to more effectively meet the evolving customer needs. By adopting Red Hat OpenStack Platform to serve as the scalable, flexible foundation for its infrastructure, IAG has set itself on the path towards digital transformation by using innovative, open, and enterprise-ready technology to help bring new services to its customer base.”

Eddie Satterly, leader, Data Engineering & DataOps, IAG
“With all the demands of a highly regulated industry and a highly competitive market, IAG is glad to have partners like Red Hat that can help evolve our approach. This platform has been a game changer in Data but also in the thinking across IAG. The Open Source culture has really taken hold.”

  • 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.



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