November Success Stories: Early adopters of RHEL for SAP Solutions on IBM POWER9 and more

While holiday festivities will look different this year, December—for many of us—will likely still include a flurry of closing out projects and tying up loose ends to set up for the upcoming year. As you sit down at your kitchen island with a cup of hot chocolate (or tea, coffee, lemon water, etc.) and open your mobile banking app to begin planning your 2021 budget, will you pause to wonder how Red Hat technologies have been in action behind the scenes to help shape not only the device you’re accessing but also the environment you’re sitting in? Maybe not, but we’re here to help get those thoughts flowing. 

As this month is a time to look ahead both at home and at work, we’re sharing some new customer success stories that may help you strategize goals for IT optimization in your enterprise or think about how digital transformation can also lend to agile practices for your staff. Let these success stories begin to frame how Red Hat technologies can help your enterprise meet customer needs in the new year. 

Long-established kitchen innovator turned early adopter of new IT solution

Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH is the central IT service provider to the BLANC & FISCHER Family Holding, which shapes kitchen living spaces worldwide. The group was among the first in Germany to adopt the combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for SAP Solutions on IBM POWER9 servers.

“Red Hat kept us updated on the certification status of the solution, so we were able to complete testing before the official notification. We were eager to be early adopters,” said Manfred Leistner, Director and Head of Technology of Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH. 

Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH quickly migrated the SAP Manufacturing Execution (SAP ME) system for the group’s BLANCO brands to the new Red Hat and IBM solution—SAP ME tracks the process of converting raw materials into finished goods. 

With its new, high-performance IT infrastructure, Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH can now run a global SAP environment from its operation headquarters in Germany. This central SAP foundation helps Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH flexibly provide computing resources to the group’s different businesses for digital transformation projects, reducing the need for local infrastructure management or provisioning work.

RHEL for SAP Solutions on IBM POWER9 helps enable Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH to support workloads or varying processing power and memory requirements without separate server systems. As a result, the group has achieved faster performance for BLANCO’s SAP ME database with half the cores needed previously. “Now that the system has gone live, we’re achieving 30% faster database transactions,” said Leistner.

Unifying and enhancing SAP operations has helped Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH create a standardized IT foundation for worldwide production, reduce database response times, and eliminate production environment downtime. For more on how Red Hat technologies have helped Blanc und Fischer IT Services GmbH improve manufacturing productivity and speed application development, check out the case study. 

Not your average holiday pie—Pibank finds competitive advantage in the digital banking age

Responding quickly to customer demand with rapid time to market is key to attracting and retaining business in the competitive direct banking sector. Banco Pichincha España, the Spanish division of the international financial institution Pichincha Group, needed to build a standardized yet flexible platform to support the necessary fast time to market for digital banking services. The bank launched Pibank, a new digital-focused bank in Spain, with a goal of providing optimized services that take advantage of the latest technology to provide an improved customer experience. 

The bank worked with VASS, a local Red Hat partner, to find platform technology that would support its goal. Red Hat OpenShift was deployed, and the platform’s core function is to support Pibank’s customer-facing website and iOS/Android mobile applications, as well as services including digital customer sign-up, mortgage contracts, and daily banking transactions for accounts and payment cards. Customers’ primary method of accessing and managing these services is online through personal devices.

Banco Pichincha España also uses Red Hat OpenShift to support middleware for Pibank, developed in-house and connected to legacy core banking systems and databases for customer-facing service delivery and process tracking.

Banco Pichincha España has achieved significantly lower operating costs for Pibank than expected with OpenShift Container Platform. “With reasonable and predictable costs, Red Hat has helped us improve our customer experience. Lower costs than a traditional IT approach give us a competitive advantage, in that we can redirect funds to innovation,” said Vicent Escorihuela, Director of IT Infrastructure and Core Banking at Pibank. 

Want to hear more about other operational efficiencies this financial services customer gained with Red Hat technologies? Reduced time to market for new banking services and improved responsiveness to meet changing banking regulations are some that are highlighted in the case study.

Rising to the agile, containerized occasion

Sunrise Communications, a Swiss provider of telecommunications and internet services, sought to adopt an iterative, microservices-based IT approach supported by container technology to build digital applications more efficiently and securely integrate with partners and acquisitions. 

Having used Red Hat technology successfully in the past, Sunrise adopted Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation of its digital-centric IT approach. Luca Broggio, Head of Applications Operations, Sunrise Communications, said, “Red Hat’s technology is clearly made by IT people who are focused on bringing benefits to business operations. Red Hat OpenShift offered the powerful functionality we needed to take an important business step.”

By standardizing the creation of new applications using microservices in Red Hat OpenShift, Sunrise has simplified configuration and management processes, leading to 75% faster time to market. A single,  central team now manages its application platform, including separate development and production environments. As a result, developers can focus on their work, rather than the underlying infrastructure—and confidently transition code from test to production. 

Moving its web applications and portals to a container- and microservices-based environment using Red Hat OpenShift has also helped Sunrise break its monolithic applications into smaller, more modular components. These applications use half as many resources compared to the company’s previous server-based approach. This improvement has led to better performance—and less time spent on provisioning, configuration, and troubleshooting.

In addition to Red Hat OpenShift, Sunrise also implemented Red Hat Runtimes, Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage, and even tapped Red Hat Consulting to guide its IT teams in adopting an agile, iterative work approach, with a foundation of modular, flexible container technology. 

“Thanks to Red Hat, with simpler, more efficient processes, we can move faster and find new ways to accelerate innovation and improvements to our customer experience,” said Elmar Grasser, CTO of Sunrise Communications. Read the full case study for a breakdown of how Red Hat technologies helped Sunrise find success.

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. From telecommunications providers to manufacturers, head to our Red Hat Success Stories page and find out how companies like yours are using Red Hat technologies.