Advent One uses Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate customer deployments

Advent One is a leading Australian managed service provider (MSP), specializing in hybrid cloud solutions. It uses Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate the deployment of new services to its customers. As a result, deployment times have halved and, using Ansible API integration with other third-party applications, new platforms are fully integrated with the business and self-service capabilities are possible. 

Benefits

• Reduced deployment times by 50%
• Provided significant support through partner programs and training
• Created automated customer self-service portals

Advent One has been operating as an IT service provider in the Australian market for more than 20 years. It solves intricate dilemmas—not only making technology work, but building foundations so its customers can grow in an effective and more secure way.

The company specializes in enterprise storage, virtualization, UNIX, IBM-i, Linux®, and Windows. In recent years, it has complemented these foundations with new capabilities to allow cloud migration and to transform the traditional IT landscape for its customers.

Advent One has been a Red Hat partner for ten years and has deepened the relationship considerably in the past five by introducing Red Hat Ansible Automation and Red Hat OpenShift solutions. PlatformONE, the company’s managed Platform-as-a-Service solution, combines expertise in infrastructure design, administration, and automation with deep understanding of customers’ most complex challenges. It is a containerized platform that allows better application orchestration and ongoing management of those applications.

“We are both a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner and a member of Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program, which demonstrates our commitment to the technology,” explains Talor Holloway, CTO, Advent One. “Ansible is now at the heart of our hybrid cloud offerings, enabling service automation and integration across multiple third parties to create slick, end-to-end solutions.”

The Advanced Business Partner level provides Advent One with enhanced benefits, plus access to additional resources designed to help build enterprise open source practices and increase revenue. Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program helps Advent One build new revenue streams which span all service provider models from public cloud to on-site managed services.

“Our customers are crying out for nimble and adaptive IT solutions and are looking increasingly at containerization, mobility, and automation–Red Hat clearly plays strongly in those areas,” agrees Jon Ossip, CEO, Advent One. “With Red Hat, we understand the intersection of on-premise, virtualized, and public cloud infrastructures, enabling us to build –and manage–the environments.”

Recently, Advent One quickly configured multifactor authentication for a customer who needed to increase security and decrease risk related to user access. The speed with which Advent One was able to add this capability is a direct result of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and its simple, agentless automation capabilities. Without Ansible Automation Platform, the capability would have taken many days to configure and deploy. 

In another recent example, Advent One used Ansible to roll out Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to a fleet of 200 servers for a customer. The company was able to do this quickly and accurately using Ansible Automation Platform.

“Ansible gives us precision when there is no room for error and provides external APIs for other vendors such as ServiceNow so it can integrate seamlessly into enterprise workflows,” continues Holloway. “Just this week, we delivered end-to-end disaster recovery failover and failback in under ten minutes using Ansible. That wouldn’t be possible even with the expensive proprietary tools on the market.”

Reduced deployment time

Advent One can now deploy new services and environments in half the time it would usually take. Operational processes have also sped up considerably. That means customers get a better, more responsive service.

“As an MSP, speed, accuracy, and security are critical and Red Hat helps us deliver those to our customers,” said Holloway. “Using Red Hat makes us a much more agile partner for our customers.”

Provided significant support

Advent One developed advanced skills through best-in-class training and is taking advanced Red Hat Ansible Automation training courses, which allow its technical and sales team to scale and deepen their open source skills.

“We participated in a mix of virtual, classroom, and onsite training with Red Hat,” comments Holloway. “It has helped us foster a culture of automation and continuous improvement, which makes bringing our services to market more compelling.”

Created self-service portals

Advent One is providing automated self-service via portals and dashboards using Red Hat technology. This allows its customers to monitor their own systems, request and generate customized reports, and carry out other activities when they need to.

“At one time, we had a ridiculous, laborious process for producing customer reports. By integrating ticket requests, we could automate report generation and make it available via a dashboard at the touch of a button,” said Holloway. “Many bespoke use cases, such as onboarding new users, can also now be done by the customer themselves because we have used the Ansible Tower API to integrate the processes and workflows.”

Looking forward, Advent One plans to evolve and mature its OpenShift skills through the Red Hat OpenShift Practice Builder Program. It already provides many services around OpenShift but feels the time is right to further develop its skills.

“We need to grow our capability higher up the stack and look at areas such as big data, machine learning, and analytics,” concludes Ossip. “Red Hat will continue to underpin our solutions and our go-to-market message.”