When it comes to driving large technology transformation on Cloud, leveraging existing investments, and optimizing open innovation within the larger ecosystem with a hybrid cloud platform, IBM Consulting™ offers several learnings to help organizations address the architecture and technology challenge. 

Consider large financial services organization going through core banking modernization. The core banking application landscape involves multiple applications (both legacy and custom off-the-shelf) that are integrated and surfaced across multiple customer experiences, including mobile. The goal of modernizing such a large application landscape is to deliver a nimble micro services architecture while also providing a robust application delivery mechanism that leverages the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes.  

As referenced in the architecture challenge section of the Mastering hybrid cloud IBV report, a single integrated hybrid cloud platform and application architecture is the chassis on which the applications can be mounted and managed, leading to dramatic improvement in software application development and production.  

One proven approach is adopting Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA) as a turnkey application development platform managed by both Red Hat and AWS. This platform manages underlying application resources and other functions (such as scalability) so that enterprises can focus on cloud-native application development or application modernization—instead of managing the complexity of the underlying application platform. A Telco customer reported that “developers can now concentrate more on their application logic and their business logic, and they can just develop applications. Our prime focus really is to develop software quickly.” 

The advantages of leveraging ROSA reach across industries. In the Travel and Transportation industry there was an unprecedented demand for post-pandemic leisure travel, which resulted in huge growth in the number of airline passengers, hotel reservations and related services such as car rentals. Similar use cases in other industries include integrated member experience in Healthcare, smart asset performance and security in Energy & Utilities, connected vehicle services in Automotive, operations and process optimization as part of industry 4.0 in Manufacturing, and customer relationship management and customer service automation in Financial Services. A  financial services customer reported “uptime and performance increased 25–30% with Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated versus a self-managed and self-supported Kubernetes application platform.” 

For these customers, adopting digital transformation tends to drive cultural change within application lifecycle management, skills and operating model changes, change management and center of excellence—which drives cloud-ready architecture patterns and education. A sustainable transformation aligns with the consistent application platform driving productivity benefits within an elastic, agile and resilient application environment. These tenets are the foundation for ROSA’s target operating model, which IBM Consulting optimizes across customer engagements.  

A Total Economic Impact™ report found that this approach led to a 50% improvement in operational efficiency, a 20% increase in recaptured developer time and a 70% reduction in the development cycle. An IDC report also found that with Red Hat OpenShift cloud services, it is possible to develop features 30-40% more quickly and with a 25% reduction in costs, compared with a public cloud provider container offering. 

Industry use cases and core application modernization engagements demonstrate the benefits of adopting the ROSA application platform, including the ability to: 

• Optimize operational costs given the underlying application platform management is fully managed by Red Hat SREs and AWS 
• Increase revenue-generating capabilities with new business application features that can be delivered in an accelerated release cycle, improving time to value 
• Lower risks of application delivery with compliance, upgrades, security and availability needs, given the platform stability and fewer vulnerabilities of the application platform 
• Innovate continuously with faster dev cycles and lower validation costs, with the consistency of the application platform 
• Manage talent focused on higher value activities of application development, skills portability, and employee retention (driving cloud native innovation, reduced development environment standup cycle, platform optimization and standardized toolsets)