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Red Hat is helping our customers succeed across a variety of industries. This month, we’re highlighting stories on customers in financial services, energy, and telecommunications that have turned to Red Hat to help improve their IT infrastructure.
A private cloud journey with a nationwide impact
Grupo ASD, a Colombian company that provides business process outsourcing (BPO) and IT solutions, sought to improve its market position with new as-a-service offerings, such as biometrics systems. As the first step of its new hybrid cloud strategy, Grupo ASD decided to build a private cloud to continue to scale beyond its existing physical infrastructure composed of more than 320 servers.
Grupo ASD worked closely with Dell Technologies, its hardware vendor and technology partner, and Red Hat Services, to plan its private cloud. As an experienced user of open source software like Linux and open source SQL databases, Grupo ASD decided to use Red Hat OpenStack Platform as the foundation of its new cloud environment. “We knew that to bring this technology transformation process forward, we needed the help of a trusted vendor,” said Víctor Morales, Director of Infrastructure and IT Services, Grupo ASD.
Migrating to a private cloud environment based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform has helped Grupo ASD optimize its hardware use. By repurposing more than 100 underused servers, the company can now provide faster, more stable services to customers. “For example, we had hardware that was used for services related to the Colombian electoral process,” said Morales. “With Red Hat OpenStack Platform, we can now use it to support new, cloud-like services based on Kubernetes containers and run workloads on either physical or virtual machines.”
With its foundation for private cloud—and eventually hybrid cloud—adoption created on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Grupo ASD plans to continue working towards its goal of becoming a digital business leader in Colombia. For more on Grupo ASD’s journey to offering flexible, scalable services to customers using Red Hat OpenStack Platform, read the full case study.
Horsepower: cloud platform lives up to its name with speed service delivery
Orange Sonatel, Senegal’s principal telecommunications service provider, needed to speed service delivery to maintain its competitive advantage. The service provider decided that a cloud-native, DevOps-based approach would provide the efficiency and scale needed. Orange Sonatel chose to modernize its IT environment by deploying Red Hat OpenShift, supported by Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Working with local partner BeOpenIT, Orange Sonatel deployed its new Red Hat software on a virtualized infrastructure to create Maalaw: a cloud platform named for the horse of Lat Dior, a key Senegalese historical figure that represents strength, bravery, loyalty and competitiveness. The service provider currently runs 15 applications on Maalaw, with plans to migrate another ten applications in the next six months.
“Before Red Hat OpenShift, an application or feature deployment required at least three steps. We had to configure the infrastructure and environment before we could deploy the application,” said Moussa Wade, Head of the Center of Excellence at Orange Sonatel. “Red Hat OpenShift provides a ready to-use environment for production deployment. Now, our developers can deploy an application in a single operation that can be live within minutes.” As a result, Orange Sonatel has reduced its time to market for new services from several months to eight weeks.
After the success of its initial migration to OpenShift, Orange Sonatel is migrating more complex applications to the environment. The service provider plans to migrate at least 60 applications within the next two years. Read the case study to learn more about how Orange Sonatel is relying on Red Hat to speed time to market.
Containerization sets up the foundation for digital business
Poste Italiane is a national institution in Italy that provides services through a physical network of post offices complemented by proprietary digital channels and third-party networks and distribution partners. Its legacy platforms were complex, costly to maintain, and lacked the modular flexibility required for more iterative development. When Poste Italiane looked for an enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform to support its focus on digital business, it turned to Red Hat.
“We recognized containerization as the de facto industry standard,” said Armando Salvatori, Head of Technology, Poste Italiane. “We chose OpenShift, and when we did, we knew we needed to work with Red Hat. Red Hat is a leading contributor to Kubernetes, and they offered the ability to share technology, expertise, and engineering resources.”
During design and delivery of its new OpenShift environment, Poste Italiane worked closely with Red Hat consultants. The organization also engaged three Red Hat Technical Account Managers (TAMs)—specializing in OpenShift, Red Hat Middleware, and Red Hat Storage, respectively—to provide ongoing support and minimize business disruption by resolving potential issues before they occur.
Within 18 months, Poste Italiane has 108 new projects in production—such as its core open banking application—and 220 new projects under development. These projects include strategic support for helping customers grow their savings, new digital channels for financial products, and optimizations for its logistics business. Several applications are now available from Poste Italiane, including a new unified front end for digital sales and Codice, a new application that supports payments via QR code.
Shifting to a digital business focus with Red Hat software has helped Poste Italiane create a responsive IT foundation to meet current and future challenges, from introducing new services to ensuring staff have access to resources through digital applications to work more safely during the COVID-19 pandemic. For more information on Poste Italiane’s journey with Red Hat, read the full customer case study.
A SQL-Server-compatible operating system with transparent roadmap and experienced support
Compañía de Expertos en Mercados SA (XM) operates Colombia’s National Interconnected System (SIN) electricity group and wholesale energy market. In 2010, XM and the Colombian Stock Exchange launched Derivex, a new system for trading energy derivatives, or contracts based on underlying energy assets such as natural gas, crude oil, or electricity. The operating system and platforms supporting XM’s database management system monopolized resources and lacked visibility, leading to complaints of slow performance and delays.
XM sought a proven, cost-effective operating system with a transparent roadmap and experienced support. Based on energy sector case studies and compatibility with its market management system, XM decided to adopt Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) and Red Hat Fuse to support a new Microsoft SQL Server deployment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). XM’s architecture team then learned about the benefits of the Linux operating system during several Red Hat events and decided to begin a pilot running SQL Server Enterprise on RHEL focused on analytics and reporting processes.
“With SQL Server on Linux, we achieved workload performance that was significantly better than our previous operating system,” said Leonel Alfonso Barrios Baños, Digital Services Analyst at XM. “A small, two-core unit performed the same work as a large, 18-core unit running on the other solution.”
After a successful pilot, XM now uses its SQL Server database engine, running on RHEL, on premises and on its Microsoft Azure public cloud to support development of database applications and microservices. With SQL Server running on RHEL, XM reports transaction response times up to three times faster. After its successful initial adoption, XM is considering expanding its use of SQL Server running on RHEL on the cloud to support all of its databases. Read the case study on Red Hat’s work with XM for more information.
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.
