Red Hat Success Stories: Creating a foundation for a containerized future

Wondering how Red Hat is helping its customers succeed? We regularly publish customer success stories that highlight how we're helping customers gain efficiency, cut costs, and transform the way they deliver software. This month we'll look at how Slovenská sporiteľňa and Bayport Financial Services have worked with Red Hat to improve their business.

Speeding provisioning and deployment

Slovenská sporiteľňa, part of Erste Group Bank AG, is the largest retail bank in Slovakia. With rising demand from customers for more modern features in its products, SLSP needed a way to release new features more quickly and more often to stay competitive. In addition, the bank sought to simplify management by transforming the inflexible, costly, monolithic application infrastructure supporting its services.

“We have 500 applications running in 10 different environments,” said Andrej Simkovic, Head of Automation and Technology at SLSP. “This complex infrastructure is difficult to manage, and the level of time and effort needed is challenging to maintain.”

SLSP began a three-phase approach to its business transformation. The first phase focused on establishing cross-functional agile teams that included analysts, business users, developers, and engineers. Next, during the processes phase, these teams worked together to optimize deployment processes and move from quarterly to monthly releases. 

The final phase, focused on tools, included on-premise implementation of Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform. During this phase, SLSP’s teams worked with ELOS Technologies s.r.o., a local Red Hat Platinum Partner, and Red Hat Consulting to standardize and automate application development and deployment processes, as well as orchestration tasks for the bank’s private cloud. SLSP also engaged Red Hat Training to provide instruction on best practices for OpenShift administration.

Using the automation capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift, combined with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, has helped SLSP streamline its provisioning process for developers. Read the entire case study and learn all about Slovenská sporiteľňa's journey to simplify and speed up its provisioning and deployment of services.

Creating a foundation for a containerized future

Bayport Financial Services is a financial services provider with operations across Africa and Latin America. To move faster and compete with global banking leaders, the company sought to streamline and speed its virtual machine (VM) environment. By migrating to Red Hat Virtualization, Bayport can now take advantage of security and performance reporting across its hybrid IT environment while providing self-service tools to developers.

As the financial services market becomes increasingly focused on digital customer experiences, Bayport sought to take advantage of this shift to create new products and compete in new market segments.

“We don’t have the legacy infrastructure or process burden of traditional banks,” said Haaike Van Der Merwe, Project Delivery & DevOps Manager at Bayport Financial Services. “We can make loan approval  decisions faster to get our customers access to funds as soon as possible. We want to be able to react to customer loan opportunities and scale quickly to outpace our competition.”

Bayport’s internal department for in-country operational and functional support promoted seeking an open source solution for greater flexibility without additional, unexpected costs.

After a successful proof of concept in South Africa, Bayport decided to migrate to Red Hat Virtualization. “During the proof of concept, we were immediately impressed by Red Hat’s level of engagement, as well as the improved performance we observed,” said Van Der Merwe. 

Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology, this platform provides robust management tools for virtualizing resources, processes, and applications, including Linux and Microsoft Windows workloads. With this environment, Bayport can not only support existing workloads, but also establish a stable, integrated foundation for future adoption of container technology—backed by enterprise support through a single point of contact.

For more on Bayport's journey to Red Hat Virtualization, read the full customer case study.

But wait, there's more!

Every month, Red Hat publishes case studies and success stories to help illustrate how our products and services can help organizations solve their problems and improve their environments. Stop by our Red Hat Success Stories page and find out how companies like yours use Red Hat technologies to find success.