Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, reports that Sunrise Communications AG has worked with Red Hat to build a hybrid cloud-ready platform and adopt an agile DevOps culture to help speed innovation and reduce time-to-market.

Sunrise has migrated several critical customer applications to its microservices architecture on Red Hat OpenShift, supported by Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage and Red Hat Runtimes and managed with the help of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Sunrise, the largest non state-controlled telecommunications company in Switzerland, offers mobile and fixed line telephony and broadband, including a modern 5G network, as well as live and on-demand video streaming services. To stay ahead of competition and convert the major opportunity that 5G presents, Sunrise is working to evolve its operations through infrastructure, product and service differentiation, and operational efficiency, with a focus on innovation and cross-pollination between its business units. As part of this effort, the IT business within Sunrise initiated a digital and cultural transformation, migrating from legacy architectures to a microservices environment and moving to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodology, where teams involved in developing and executing innovation collaborate more closely.

Already using Red Hat open source platform and middleware technologies, Sunrise looked to Red Hat for the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform and for support with the transition to a more agile culture. Red Hat Consulting provided a series of custom workshops and training sessions to help Sunrise to make full use of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud technologies based on the needs of the business, which included development of a reusable blueprint for application development.

Sunrise is now running critical customer-facing applications on its Red Hat OpenShift-based platform, including Roaming Cockpit, which enables customers to configure roaming services and to purchase roaming packages for travelling abroad; My Sunrise, a customer portal that enables subscribers to manage usage and add service bundles; and Sunrise Business Portal, an end-to-end user interface where business customers can activate new SIMs, manage employee devices and configure services according to every user’s individual needs.

Sunrise has been able to streamline processes, reduce costs and foster more open collaboration between business owners and developers. Sunrise can now take a project from idea to production much faster than previously. Sunrise’s web applications and web portals consume much less IT infrastructure resources on Red Hat OpenShift as compared to their former servers, resulting in improved performance and productivity. Sunrise has gained scalability and consistency, more secure control and reusability of deployments, reducing time spent on manual infrastructure provisioning.

The Red Hat solutions have made it easier for Sunrise to support the needs of business customers affected by COVID-19 and direct IT resources to where they’re needed most, such as handling an increase in customer engagement through digital channels, maintaining unrestricted customer support, removing data/speed limits, extending SME payment terms, handling higher data traffic and supporting mass-scale home-working.

As Sunrise continues to innovate by combining different services from its business, Sunrise has set out plans to use Red Hat Integration as a core pillar of its microservices architecture to connect heterogeneous applications, data and devices, across hybrid infrastructures. Red Hat solutions will be used to integrate new cloud-native services as well as traditional monoliths with systems including CRM, billing and charging. Sunrise is also exploring the opportunity to move workloads to the public cloud with Red Hat OpenShift as its underlying hybrid cloud platform, to support greater scale in the future.

Darrell Jordan Smith, Red Hat’s vice president, Global Industries says, “At Red Hat, we are committed to helping our customers transform and innovate. Sunrise is passionate about its transition to a more agile culture and cloud-native architecture and is using Red Hat OpenShift in a forward-thinking way that elevates it to a powerful position to execute on its strategies for 5G, cloud edge computing, Internet of Things (IoT) and new vertical industry opportunities as these elements come together.”

Elmar Grasser, chief technology officer, Sunrise Communications AG adds, “We wanted to go all-in on containers, and we were convinced by Red Hat OpenShift as a powerful platform that would enable us to leap into the future. Now OpenShift is a central part of our business IT, and has given us the opportunity to be more flexible and responsive.

Red Hat understood our goals and challenges, and through close collaboration has helped us streamline the implementation and get the team fluent with the platform and its capabilities. We’ve been able to simplify processes to become more efficient. Now that we can move faster, we’re constantly evaluating how to accelerate innovation and improve the customer experience even further.”

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