The operator wants an agile DevOps culture to speed innovation and reduce time-to-market.
To these ends, 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.
Elmar Grasser (pictured), CTO, Sunrise Communications, said, “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.”
Evolution
Sunrise is the second largest operator in Switzerland after the former incumbent Swisscom. It offers mobile and fixed line telephony and broadband, including a 5G network, and live and on-demand streaming services.
To capitalise on 5G and build competitive advantage, Sunrise is evolving 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.
It is moving to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodology, where teams involved in developing and executing innovation collaborate more closely.
Shift to customer centricity
Sunrise already uses using Red Hat platform and middleware technologies. Red Hat provided a series of custom workshops and training sessions to help Sunrise to make full use of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud technologies based to meet business needs.
This included development of a reusable blueprint for application development. Sunrise is 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.
It also supports 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.
All in on containers
Grasser added, “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.”