In the telecoms industry, the COVID-19 pandemic generated a huge demand for bandwidth and reliable services as large numbers of people started working from home. Service providers have had to meet changing bandwidth requirements as people adjusted to working, schooling, socialising and consuming digital media remotely in locations not previously considered. In many cases this has had an acceleration effect on digital transformation initiatives.
One company forging ahead with its modernisation and innovation strategy is stc, a leading telecom and digital services provider in the Middle East. Turki Almushaigh, Enterprise Enablement GM, at stc said: “Our mission is to deliver enhanced user experiences to customers and internal teams, while aligning with broader digital transformation goals set by the Saudi government. We are modernising our infrastructure to optimise our agility as a business, speed up time to market of innovative digital services and improve cost efficiency of network transformation. Red Hat is one of our key partners along this journey.”
stc has chosen Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies, including Red Hat OpenShift as its horizontal cloud platform. Red Hat OpenShift is the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes container platform, with full-stack automated operations to manage and scale applications from the core to the edge, on any cloud. Red Hat OpenShift is optimized to improve developer productivity and promote innovation in a fast, efficient and secure manner.
Ayhem Alzaaim, Red Hat’s ICT regional manager, Middle East, Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, Pakistan and Turkey, explained, “We are collaborating closely with stc on the design, trials, and implementation of the platform, as well as tech enablement and cultural best practices including agile working methodologies like DevOps and CI/CD. A team of Red Hat experts is dedicated to helping stc to migrate its existing workloads to Red Hat OpenShift as well as use the platform to create new microservices-based applications and deliver them to users and customers faster. Through these kinds of activities and initiatives, stc will continue to cement itself as one of the top service providers globally.”
The interoperability of open source solutions and the breadth of Red Hat’s ecosystem of certified partners provides organizations like stc with greater flexibility and freedom of choice of suppliers and technologies, enabling them to build multi-vendor, multi-application networks. The use of open platforms and common toolsets for cloud-native applications across IT, data and networking environments helps reduce operational costs while accelerating revenues.
According to Ayhem Alzaaim, Red Hat is helping stc and other telcos embrace the latest in cloud-native approaches as well as automation through consulting programs. “Some of the benefits of cloud-native are faster time to deploy services, elastic scale, and greater ease of operating a complex networking and service environment. And, with the move to cloud-based systems, we have new software platforms and tools that enable service providers to automate processes that they couldn’t before, to achieve major efficiencies in provisioning, configuration and lifecycle management of devices and applications. Red Hat provides a unified system for secure and centralised management and automation of network and IT applications.”
“We are excited to be working with forward-looking companies like stc to help get them ready to meet the changing requirements of the next generation of customers with the right framework and governance in place to go to market securely and disrupt the competition.”
