Red Hat Ansible Automation Accelerates Past Major Adoption Milestone, Now Manages More Than Four Million Customer Systems Worldwide

RALEIGH, N.C.
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September 11, 2019
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Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that more than four million customer systems worldwide are now automated by Red Hat Ansible Automation. Customers, including Energy Market Company, Microsoft, Reserve Bank of New Zealand and Surescripts all use Red Hat Ansible Automation to automate and orchestrate their IT operations, helping to expand automation across IT stacks.

According to a blog post by Chris Gardner with Forrester Research, who was the author of The Forrester Wave(TM): Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q3 2019, “Infrastructure automation isn’t just on-premises or the cloud. It’s at the edge and everywhere in between.”¹ Since its launch in 2013, Red Hat Ansible Automation has provided a single tool to help organizations automate across IT operations and development, including infrastructure, networks, cloud, security and beyond.

Datacom and Microsoft, among many other customers, will speak to their Red Hat Ansible Automation deployments and experiences with automating across their organizations at AnsibleFest Atlanta, September 24-26, 2019.

Several representative deployments around the globe include:

Datacom is Red Hat’s largest partner in New Zealand, and when Reserve Bank of New Zealand announced in November 2013 that it was undertaking a strategic review of one of its key systems, they turned to Datacom to house, build, support and operate the infrastructure. The review considered the firm’s and the industry’s requirements of those systems in anticipation of substantial upgrades that will be necessary over the next five years. To help automate the necessary upgrades, Reserve Bank of New Zealand worked with Datacom to implement Red Hat Ansible Automation. After two years, tens of thousands of lines of codes and the creation of hundreds of playbooks and roles, the team has coded the build requirements and stood up all necessary environments using Ansible – including servers and applications installed with ongoing performance benchmarking, fine-tuning and extensive testing.

Energy Market Company (EMC), operates the wholesale market of the National Electricity Market of Singapore (NEMS), Asia’s first liberalized electricity market. The company was due for a server hardware and applications refresh for its core settlement and Market Rules engine system. However, the proprietary stack it was built on was aging and restricting innovation efforts to support upgraded NEMS applications as stipulated by market regulations. To address this need, EMC migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP), Red Hat Process Automation Manager, and Red Hat Ansible Automation to facilitate continuous integration and continuous delivery through IT automation. With Red Hat Ansible Automation , EMC has been able to automate the process of software integration, testing and deployment, allowing the company to build, test and release software more rapidly, frequently and reliably.

Microsoft was looking for tools and platforms to empower its network engineers and make them more productive and able to focus on customer-facing value. With hundreds of engineers spread over more than 600 locations worldwide, Microsoft needed a solution that was easy to understand and simple to share across teams and geographic locations. Microsoft deployed Red Hat Ansible Automation on Azure to transform the way they design, build, and deploy IT networks at scale. Through automating with Red Hat Ansible Automation, the company has saved around 3,000 work hours per year and greatly reduced downtime.

Surescripts, a leading health information network in the United States, transmits nearly 13 billion secure health data transactions annually — including nearly five million electronic prescriptions each day. To help meet growing business demands, the company decided to divide its large legacy code bases into microservices to release new features and services faster and more frequently. After evaluating several potential management and automation solutions, Surescripts chose Red Hat Ansible Automation to support its new microservices-based code infrastructure. With Red Hat Ansible Automation, Surescripts can now quickly deploy network appliances and servers, as well as resolve any issues with minimal downtime, speeding the launch of new applications to its customers.

Supporting Quotes
Thomas Anderson, Ansible business owner, Red Hat
“At a global level we have seen organizations choose Red Hat Ansible Automation not only because of the simplicity, scalability and composability it provides, but also for its ability to drive cultural transformation within organizations. We’re now working to make it even easier to collaborate across teams, helping to break down automation silos and embrace automation across an organization.”

Joseph Tejal, systems engineer, Datacom
“When looking at automation tools for Reserve Bank of New Zealand, we knew that the system would require high availability and reliable architecture with geographically separated redundancy and a high level of security and integrity. Ultimately, Red Hat Ansible Automation was chosen for its orchestration capabilities as well as its radical simplicity and efficiency for multi-tier enterprise level deployments.”

Lau Chee Kiong, senior vice president, Technology, Energy Market Company
“Our operations are IT-intensive due to the sophisticated market model, the quantity of data, multiple communication links and the requirement to operate the market on a 24-hour basis every day. With Red Hat technologies, we have been able to digitally transform our infrastructure, preparing us for future growth in the market as well as enabling us to scale the NEMS System upwards and outwards easily as needed.”

Bart Dworak, software engineering manager, Infrastructure and Operations, Network, Microsoft
“Adopting Red Hat Ansible Automation has not only changed how our networks are managed, but also sparked a cultural transformation within our organization. By putting automation at the forefront of our strategy and not as an afterthought, we’ve been able to scale it in ways we did not know possible. Our engineers are now constantly looking for creative ways to solve their problems using Ansible Playbooks.”

Michael Perzel, principal DevOps engineer, Surescripts
“For our customers to more quickly and effectively deliver necessary services to healthcare professionals and their patients, prolonged system and service downtime is not an option. With Red Hat Ansible Automation we have been able to automate and streamline management of our infrastructure, allowing us to dramatically cut issue resolution time, reduce downtime and ultimately improve our customer satisfaction.”

¹ Infrastructure Automation Platforms: Coopetition At Its Fiercest, Chris Gardner Forrester blog post, August 2019