Red Hat openshift container platform takes digital innovation into the fast lane with major european automaker

Boston – Red Hat Summit 2017 – MAY 3, 2017 — May 3, 2017: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that BMW Group, the world’s leading premium manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles, has deployed Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to support its delivery of business applications and services. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is used by enterprises like BMW Group to embrace innovation, speed application development and time-to-market and gain more flexibility to scale services on-demand.

"The BMW Group shows just how an organization can embrace agile methodologies and modern container technologies to deliver business value and an enhanced customer experience." Ashesh Badani vice president and general manager, OpenShift, Red Hat

In the competitive automotive industry, IT infrastructure does not only support internal functions such as development and manufacturing, but it also has to enable the delivery of digital services addressing the heightened customer expectations regarding reliability and performance. A majority of customers interact directly with the BMW Group through its IT services. Almost all cars the BMW Group ships are delivered with BMW ConnectedDrive, the company’s digital product that connects the driver and vehicle with a range of services and apps that provide the driver with vehicle-related information, assistance and entertainment during journeys or allows them to remotely access the vehicle.

The BMW Group currently hosts more than 1,000 web-based apps, showing the growing demand for discoverable, easy-to-use application hubs. This growth highlights a major need for many enterprises: scaling existing applications and services dynamically to meet demand while bringing new innovations to market faster. Traditional enterprise architectures are often monolithic in nature, which can struggle to handle the dynamic needs of modern workloads. This has led many global businesses to seek more flexible application infrastructure that embraces more agile development and IT operations methodology, including continuous delivery, continuous integration and extensive automation.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is the first and only container-centric, hybrid cloud solution built from Linux containers and the Kubernetes, Project Atomic and OpenShift Origin upstream projects and based on the trusted backbone of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform provides a more secure, stable platform for container-based deployments without sacrificing current IT investments, allowing for mission-critical, traditional applications to coexist alongside new, cloud-native and container-based applications.

With its developers preferring to use industry-standard technologies, the BMW Group valued Red Hat’s extensive contributions to both the docker and Kubernetes projects and its enterprise-ready version of these technologies. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform also supports multiple public clouds, allowing for the exploration of hybrid cloud strategies while maintaining applications that are independent of underlying infrastructure, allowing for organizations like the BMW Group to choose the technology that most closely delivers on its needs at any moment in time. Additionally, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform’s streamlined integration with existing technology stacks preserves existing investments while enabling faster moves to a modern cloud-native runtime environment.

BMW ConnectedDrive is subject to large fluctuations in service requests, depending on the time of day, weather conditions, traffic incidents and other factors. After the decomposition of traditional applications into microservices running on containers, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform enables the BMW Group to do point scaling to adjust loads to peaks and troughs in demand and to deliver the continuous service that today’s consumers expect.

The BMW Group has initially rolled out Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in its Germany-based enterprise datacenter, focused on supporting ConnectedDrive.

Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift, Red Hat

“The BMW Group shows just how an organization can embrace agile methodologies and modern container technologies to deliver business value and an enhanced customer experience. We are pleased to support a leader in automotive innovation as it grows its technological prowess and innovation capabilities to offer services faster and more reliably. Seeing a business streamline the application development process, from creation to deployment, is key to enterprise-level digital transformation and a trend that we hope to see more and more, especially as other organizations follow the example of trailblazers like the BMW Group.”