EMEA EN: Transports Publics Genevois Drives Cloud-Native Application Delivery with Red Hat

ZURICH
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June 16, 2021
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Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Transports Publics Genevois (TPG) has selected Red Hat to help it shift to a containerized, Kubernetes-based IT environment. TPG adopted Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, and Red Hat Quay to improve application development efficiency, better meet software security requirements and increase services availability during peak usage.

Red Hat OpenShift is the most mature Kubernetes distribution on the market, one of the richest platforms in terms of features and offers the best support for TPG. It is exactly the solution we needed because it allows us to modernize our applications in a more agile and flexible way. This benefits our service providers, our IT team and, of course, most importantly, our customers.

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TPG is the leading public transport company in the Geneva metropolitan area. The company’s mission is to shape mobility in the region by offering its customers a quality service in line with the principles of sustainable development. To fulfill this mission, TPG’s IT department offers various applications to internal and external customers, which are developed by third party providers. To modernize the process of developing and deploying these applications, TPG decided to adopt microservices, containers and a Linux environment. TPG saw the recent success experienced by one of Switzerland’s largest railway companies in adopting Red Hat technologies, and wanted to have a similar experience – leading the organization to select Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation for its transformation.

Working with Apalia, a systems integrator specialized in cloud, container and IT automation technologies, TPG deployed Red Hat OpenShift on-premises on virtualized infrastructure. After successfully migrating some regular internal workloads, TPG began migrating larger, client-facing systems. By mid-summer 2020, the company had migrated its most critical Java-based applications to Red Hat OpenShift: its ticketing web store for its customers and the backend of its mobile app. Through the TPG app, users can buy tickets, check schedules and plan their trips.

Scalability is key for TPG, and the company can now more quickly adapt its systems during periods of increased demand with many customers accessing services simultaneously. Red Hat OpenShift enables automatic scaling and provides additional capacity on demand which previously had to be created manually. This elasticity allows TPG to save on costs and resources.

TPG is also able to provide customer services even during system maintenance, whereas these windows used to cause interruptions lasting several hours, which affected the webshop of TPG and ticket sales. With Red Hat OpenShift, TPG can roll out updates, update apps or release new services in the background without impacting customer experience. The IT team can now perform tasks during office hours instead of having to switch to evening hours, as was previously the case. For the webshop, downtime went from two to zero hours, which means cost savings of two to three hours every three months to apply updates.

By coupling its CI/CD pipeline with Red Hat OpenShift, TPG has accelerated the deployment of new applications and software versions in a more agile fashion. Developers can independently provision production environments, write and deploy code and thus test and validate their applications without having to wait for IT operations to handle it. As a result, TPG has reduced time for application deployments by 80%. TPG also standardized its container registry for third-party images with Red Hat Quay, reducing security risks and improving application performance and redundancy.

TPG plans to pursue its collaboration in the future with Red Hat, further driving the company’s digital transformation.

Supporting Quotes

Leonard Bodmer, regional director ALPS Region (Austria & Switzerland), Red Hat
“Transportation and mobility are changing rapidly, leading organizations in these industries to seek out innovative solutions that support scalability and can adapt more agilely to evolving requirements. With Red Hat OpenShift, TPG was able to effectively address these demands, while accelerating and enhancing control over its deployment process, furthering its digital transformation around public transport.”

Charles Gauchon, Head of IT Infrastructure & Operations, Transports publics genevois
“One of our biggest challenges was the lack of control over the delivery process of our applications. We were also looking for a way to automate and standardize the development and deployment of software. Red Hat OpenShift is the most mature Kubernetes distribution on the market, one of the richest platforms in terms of features and offers the best support for TPG. It is exactly the solution we needed because it allows us to modernize our applications in a more agile and flexible way. This benefits our service providers, our IT team and, of course, most importantly, our customers.”

Pierre Vacherand, Chief Technology Officer, Apalia
“TPG realized that a Kubernetes-based solution will take its IT Organization to the next level, while acknowledging that implementing Kubernetes requires both technological and cultural changes for the software development and IT operations teams. We are pleased to have been able to leverage our collaboration with Red Hat and have successfully been assisting TPG to adopt the OpenShift platform, build and automate CI/CD pipelines, and apply DevOps best practices.”

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