Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that leading organizations across Europe, including Fastweb, Paddy Power Betfair, and Produban, have deployed Red Hat OpenStack Platform as the backbone of their cloud initiatives.

Research firm IDC noted in early 2015, “As European enterprises enter the most critical phase in the 3rd Platform era – the innovation phase, they want new, yet cost-effective technologies to bring their ideas to fruition. Their desire to avoid vendor lock-ins, and reduce software licensing fees are steering them to evaluate OpenStack for building their cloud infrastructures.”¹ According to the 2016 Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook, OpenStack proofs-of-concept (POCs) and deployments are expected to accelerate in 2016, with 39 percent of respondents planning to implement OpenStack POCs or production deployments this year.

Red Hat is a private and hybrid cloud leader, with open source solutions spanning the datacenter’s four footprints - from bare metal and virtualized environments to private and public cloud. Red Hat is also a staunch supporter and leading provider of OpenStack - both in contributions to the upstream OpenStack community as well as delivery of a production-ready OpenStack platform to enterprise customers. Red Hat OpenStack Platform, a highly scalable, production-ready Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, has emerged as the open source cloud platform of choice for a growing number of global organizations. Co-engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and hardened and backed by Red Hat's support lifecycle, Red Hat OpenStack Platform offers a proven, fully open foundation for cloud deployments.

In Europe, Red Hat has seen strong momentum, highlighted by several successful production deployments, including:

• Fastweb, a leading Italian telecommunications company, provides enterprise cloud-based information and communications technology (ICT) services to Italian businesses that lack internal resources to independently develop and support them. As its user uptake grew, Fastweb needed to improve the automation and self-service capabilities according to the highly dynamic customer needs. Therefore, in order to meet the market needs with an agile and flexible approach, Fastweb migrated to Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
• Paddy Power Betfair, one of the largest online betting companies, and the largest betting exchange in the world, built its success by using technology as a strategic advantage to disrupt the betting industry. Paddy Power Betfair’s i2 program, which aims to create a greenfield private cloud platform for Paddy Power Betfair using Red Hat OpenStack Platform and software-defined networking (SDN) in order to support continuous delivery of Paddy Power Betfair’s applications. With its new OpenStack-based private cloud, Paddy Power Betfair can deliver a new network and hosting infrastructure based on IaaS principles, hosting all development, test and production applications, and the associated tooling in a single location. Using SDN, Paddy Power Betfair reports that it has been able to reduce its reliance on physical networking equipment and simplify network operations, enabling them to process more transaction volume per second with less server downtime.
• Produban, Santander bank’s IT services company, specializes in the continuous design and IT infrastructure operation. Produban’s global footprint includes 10 datacenters to support all of Grupo Santander’s businesses, including Banco Santander, S.A., one of Europe’s largest banks and among the largest banks globally by market value. To support its global datacenters, Produban built a hybrid cloud infrastructure based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Red Hat CloudForms, and software-defined technology from Nuage Networks, a Red Hat certified partner. Produban also deployed OpenShift Enterprise, Red Hat’s container application-development platform, as the default Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution to develop and deploy its enterprise banking applications. The new solution meets Produban’s requirements for an open hybrid cloud that includes core infrastructure (IaaS), DevOps (PaaS), and multi-cloud management, all built on an underlying virtualized network.