VMware® Enterprise PKS supports Swisscom to take a leadership position in emerging Kubernetes-as-a-Service market. It reduces development costs, improves development times, and creates freedom of choice around cloud deployments.
“When you work for Swisscom, you understand that you’re participating in the digital transformation of Switzerland.”
These are not the words of Swisscom’s CEO, but of Olivier Fournier, a senior engineer in the Swisscom DevOps team. An understanding of Swisscom’s role in society percolates through the entire organization.
Increasingly, the engine that is powering the country’s digital transformation is the adoption of cloud services by Swiss enterprise. For many, Swisscom’s Enterprise Service Cloud helps deliver this infrastructure, seamlessly linking on-premise and virtual private environments. Swisscom professional services allow every company to be guided individually on its journey to the cloud.
But the pace of change is relentless. Swisscom is competing not just with standard telco suppliers, but with the world’s best cloud service providers. It cannot be late; its services must be world-class.
To bring new digital services to market faster, Swisscom wants to adopt Kubernetes, an open source container-orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. This will increase the speed and efficiency of Swisscom’s application development.
It wants to make this available for internal workloads, but, as an IT service provider, it also wants to make this available to enterprise customers through Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS).
A KaaS platform bundles an application together with everything it needs to run in a cloud or on-premise environment. These include orchestration, automation, ability to scale, and security.
Faster, more efficient application development
VMware Enterprise PKS enables Swisscom to operationalize Kubernetes for multi-cloud enterprises and service providers. It is the latest initiative in a long-term engagement between Swisscom and VMware.
With enterprise features such as enhanced security, high availability, rolling upgrade, constant health monitoring and self-healing, VMware Enterprise PKS is built for running critical workloads in production.
VMware Enterprise PKS addresses a broad range of Kubernetes challenges such as networking, security, storage, monitoring and logging. This is achieved by including VMware NSX-T™ Data Center and integrating with other VMware products. VMware Enterprise PKS runs seamlessly on VMware vSphere®, as well as on public clouds like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon EC2, and Microsoft Azure.
The use of NSX-T Data Center is critical. It ensures customer workloads are kept separate, with no risk of data ‘bleeding’ between environments.
The successful launch of Kubernetes-as-a-Service strengthens Swisscom’s position in the Swiss market – and makes available world-class IT services to the country’s enterprise customers.
This supports innovation and digital transformation for both Swisscom and its customers, and reflects market demand for digital transformation: more enterprise customers are developing new services based on containers or moving existing workload to containers. Swisscom can serve these customers, keeping data within Switzerland and benefitting from the flexibility of cloud.
It allows Swisscom to take a leadership position in this emerging market, and strengthens its own strategic relationship with key enterprise customers.
“We get live feedback on how KaaS is performing, and better understand the customer’s challenges,” says Fournier. “In return, the customer sees Swisscom as a responsive, market leader.”
Of course, this is a journey, not a destination. Fournier says the company is already exploring VMware Tanzu and VMware vSphere 7 with Kubernetes. Tanzu will allow Swisscom to develop cloud-native apps and maintain existing apps side-by-side, on the same enterprise-grade platform. vSphere 7 with Kubernetes will allow the company to accelerate innovation by converging containers and VMs into the VMware vSphere platform with native Kubernetes.
“We’re confident VMware can help us embrace multi-cloud technology,” states Fournier.
