AFRICA
REGIONAL CHANNELS
AFRICA
With the aim of reducing application deployment time from weeks to minutes , Orange Sonatel , Senegal ’ s leading telco , recently built a new platform , Malaw , with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to deliver new services to customers across the Economic Community of West African States ( ECOWAS ). Moussa Wade , Head of the Centre of Excellence , Orange Sonatel , tells Intelligent CIO Africa why the company decided to modernise its IT environment by deploying Red Hat OpenShift .
ORANGE SONATEL LAUNCHES NEW SERVICES WITH RED HAT OPENSHIFT
Orange Sonatel , one of Senegal ’ s
leading telecommunications service provider , needed to speed service delivery to maintain its competitive advantage . The service provider decided that a cloud-native , DevOps-based approach would provide the efficiency and scale needed . By building a new platform , Malaw , with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform , Orange Sonatel can quickly migrate and build core applications . Now , the service provider can deliver new services to customers across Africa within weeks .
Maintaining telecoms market leadership
Orange Sonatel was created when Orange SA purchased a controlling stake in Société Nationale des Télécommunications du Senegal ( Sonatel ), one of Senegal ’ s leading telecommunications service provider . Its mission is to provide quality , affordable services , including fixed-line , mobile , Internet , television and corporate telecommunications services across ECOWAS . The service provider is constructing fibre optic networks across Africa and manages 2,200 kilometres of fibre cable in Senegal .
To stay Senegal ’ s preferred telecommunications service provider , Orange
Sonatel needed to deliver high-quality , highly available services at the speed of customer demand . However , using the community version of Docker on virtual machines meant deploying a new application took the service provider ’ s team days or even weeks . Delivering a new developer environment took at least three weeks .
A highly motivated team of young engineers at Orange Sonatel began exploring new technologies to help the company maintain and extend its market leadership . The service provider decided to implement a cloud-native , microservicesbased technology strategy and adopt a DevOps approach .
Migrating core applications to an enterprise container platform
To adopt this modern technology and approach , Orange Sonatel sought a solution that would combine the fast-paced innovation of open source technology with enterprise support and security .
“ We plan to migrate at least 88 % of our applications to the cloud . Such an aggressive plan needs a stable , secure and supported enterprise platform ,” said Moussa Wade , Head of the Centre of Excellence at Orange Sonatel . “ But we wanted an open-sourcebased platform , because it is cost-effective and the community is very responsive .”
Orange Sonatel decided to modernise its IT environment by deploying Red Hat OpenShift , supported by Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform .
“ We selected Red Hat OpenShift because of its leading position in the market and because of its competitive pricing and features ,” said Wade . “ We were impressed by the results of an internal proof of concept ( PoC ) that showed how its automation capabilities could help us accelerate our delivery process .”
Red Hat is an enterprise Kubernetes application platform that unites IT and developers to support faster , more reliable development , deployment and management of container applications across cloud and infrastructure . OpenShift Container Storage provides block , shared file and object data storage for containers and manages the OpenShift registry , logging and metrics . Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform , an enterprise automation solution for complex deployments , automates patch and update management at the scale required for telecommunications networks .
Working with local partner , BeOpenIT , Orange Sonatel deployed its new Red Hat
30