Red Hat announced today that both Swisscom and UKCloud will be leveraging its OpenStack platform as the companies transition toward cloud computing. Swisscom will use the platform to develop its own cloud platform, and UKCloud will provide its customers with the ability to deliver digital services directly to UK citizens.
Swisscom’s new cloud
In the Swisscom deal, Red Hat will help the telco expand its cloud offering to deliver new digital products faster.
Swisscom is increasingly offering more cloud services to its customers to develop and build their own software and will use the Red Hat OpenStack Platform to accomplish that. Some of Swisscom’s customers include reinsurance company Swiss Re and security company Dorma Kaba.
The cloud platform will allow Swisscom to provide its customers with a self-service environment to help with prototyping and faster development of custom software and applications.
The open source environment offered by Red Hat was a key factor in Swisscom’s decision, the company said. With its new cloud platform, Swisscom has developed new applications including MyCloud, which is designed to offer unlimited storage to residential Swisscom customers.
UKCloud embraces Red Hat
The cloud provider for the U.K. government, UKCloud, is now standardized on the Red Hat OpenStack Platform with Red Hat Ceph Storage to help deliver digital services to its public sector customers.
UKCloud provides a public cloud for UK public sectors in industries like healthcare, defense, police, and justice. These organizations include the Cabinet Office, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), Home Office, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), and Ministry of Defense (MOD).
UKCloud wanted to improve its enterprise platform with Red Hat’s open source technologies as more of its customers are switching to cloud-native applications. Its platform is used to host both citizen web applications and sensitive government systems across public sector networks.
The government cloud provider touts Red Hat’s open source technology as a way to free customers of proprietary public cloud platforms as well as a way to provide its customers with more infrastructure tools.
Red Hat and UKCloud were able to integrate the open source technology in a six-month time frame to meet the deadline of G-Cloud. This is a U.K. government initiative to help its public sector adopt cloud computing.
Identifying a trend
Most recently, Ericsson announced that it would support the Red Hat OpenStack platform. Building on an already-established partnership, the two companies now provide joint collaboration across sales, marketing, engineering and customer support.
This is important for Ericsson because its infrastructure products now support the Red Hat ecosystem, which is widely used among enterprises and service providers.
Companies such as Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, Telefonica, and Nokia have also picked up the platform as a way to participate in the OpenStack community.