BARCELONA -- Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Swisscom has selected Red Hat as its technology partner to help the company deliver a modern, agile, and highly scalable cloud platform. Deploying Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Virtualization as the basis of its new cloud infrastructure, Swisscom has been able to develop and deliver new digital products faster and more efficiently.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform enables us to take our cloud strategy one step further, helping us to be flexible in multiple senses. We can scale up and down our clusters; we can fully automate our deployments; and we have limited our downtime when we make changes in production."

To help maintain a leading position while supporting a growing customer base looking to benefit from new and emerging digital services, Swisscom wanted to expand its cloud offerings. It required a technology platform that could provide the flexibility needed to support ongoing innovation and development – across both its own organization and customer base.

Recognizing that Red Hat OpenStack Platform offers a highly scalable, open, and production-ready Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, the organization chose Red Hat as its preferred technology partner. Co-engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and backed by Red Hat's enterprise support lifecycle, Red Hat OpenStack Platform offers an open foundation for scalable cloud deployments. Red Hat OpenStack Platform now provides the infrastructure foundation needed for Swisscom’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Offering flexible bandwidth based on workloads, Swisscom is helping to simplify rapid prototyping and agile development, while offering a self-service environment to Swisscom’s customers to develop their own applications.

While an open source environment was a key factor in Swisscom’s decision, so too was Red Hat’s ecosystem expertise. Swisscom recognized Red Hat’s contributions to the upstream OpenStack community, and worked with Red Hat Consulting to gain access to upstream and downstream expertise, as well as Red Hat’s leadership in delivering a production-ready OpenStack platform for hundreds of organizations around the world.

In addition to selecting Red Hat OpenStack Platform to deliver its cloud platform, Swisscom also uses Red Hat Virtualization. This solution uses the same KVM-based virtualization technology found in Red Hat OpenStack Platform, meaning that the same team can manage the environments and Swisscom can achieve more consistency. With both Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Virtualization, Swisscom can now more easily scale its clusters up and down on-demand and fully automate deployments, all while limiting downtime during production changes. It can also increase platform density, hosting different customer workloads on the same cluster and platform.

As a result of the size and flexible cloud computing capacity offered by Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Swisscom has created new offerings. One example is MyCloud, a new cloud application that is designed to offer unlimited storage for residential customers. The application is developed, hosted and managed on Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

Supporting Quotes

Marco Hochstrasser, head of Cloud Platform Development, Swisscom

“Our mission at Swisscom is to give every citizen in Switzerland a piece of the cloud, and we are one of the first service providers in Europe to launch a publicly available, commercial cloud offering at the scale we have. Red Hat OpenStack Platform enables us to take our cloud strategy one step further, helping us to be flexible in multiple senses. We can scale up and down our clusters; we can fully automate our deployments; and we have limited our downtime when we make changes in production. As a result, we are proud to say we now have organizations outside of Switzerland using our solution.”

Stephan Massalt, vice president of Cloud, Swisscom

“Swisscom is committed to guiding our customers into the digital age. Being a partner for us really means that you’re engaged in the way we build our solutions, how we offer them to our customers, and how we develop them in the future. Red Hat is a pivotal partner in this mission.”

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat

“As a consumer of telecoms and IT services I have come to expect access to innovative applications. As a technologist I can appreciate the challenges faced by operators such as Swisscom in terms of bringing those new services to market. It is, therefore, gratifying to see the flexibility and scalability of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Virtualization being used to help bring innovative new services to market.”

Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT)
Swisscom AG (NYSE: SCM)