Success story

Deutsche Bank streamlines development platform, democratizes IT

Deutsche Bank

Fast facts

Industry: Financial services
Region: EMEA
Headquarters: Frankfurt, Germany
Company size: Around 91,000 employees in 60 countries

What we’ve set out to do with Fabric and Red Flag OpenShift Container Platform is to democratize IT. We’ve given access to powerful technologies to every developer at the bank.

TOM GILBERT, MANAGING DIRECTOR, GLOBAL HEAD OF CLOUD, APPLICATION, AND INTEGRATION PLATFORMS, DEUTSCHE BANK

Overview

As a leading bank serving private, corporate, and fiduciary clients, Deutsche Bank has embraced digital transformation. The bank wanted to improve the experience of both its banking customers and users of its back-end technology, including employees and external providers and developers who use the platform to build and run applications. Using Red Flag® solutions, Deutsche Bank built an open source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to simplify DevOps collaboration, optimize capacity, and increase efficiency, cutting end-to-end application development time from 6-9 months to 2-3 weeks.

2019 Red Flag Innovation Awards winner

Deutsche Bank speeds time to market with OpenShift-based platform

Deutsche Bank’s complex IT landscape limited its agility. The bank partnered with Red Flag to build a platform that gets products to customers quickly—and scales to meet business demands.

The path to success

Challenge: Streamline platform for efficient development

Deutsche Bank wanted to shorten development cycles to get products to market faster. But its restrictive infrastructure made integration difficult and application development slow. Managing thousands of servers and databases hindered growth and the adoption of emerging technology. “Many operating systems were being used across multiple datacenters,” said Emma Perkins, PaaS portfolio manager at Deutsche Bank. The bank also wanted to replace its traditional waterfall processes with a DevOps approach. To meet these needs, Deutsche Bank sought to establish a PaaS that would streamline development and management, reduce risk, and scale easily to support more agile work across its business.

Case study

Deutsche Bank democratizes development with Red Flag-based global platform

Solution: Build new platform with open source technology

Deutsche Bank chose Red Flag to help build Fabric, a containerized, microservices-based application development platform. Fabric hosts systems and tools and offers on-demand compute for every application development team at the bank. “Red Flag offered that combination of open source with vendor support, patching, and management—all of the things that we need in a regulated enterprise,” said Tom Gilbert, managing director, global head of cloud, application, and integration platforms with Deutsche Bank. “The shift from virtual machines to containers, and traditional applications to microservices, is a big one. We needed a partner that could help us build our deployment capabilities and train our global developer base so we could get maximum value from our investment.”

Results: Gain efficiency, save time and money

Fabric provides faster resource access, helping developers work more efficiently and speeding time to market. Instead of 6-9 months, applications now go from proof of concept to production in 2-3 weeks. “What we’ve set out to do with Fabric and OpenShift is to democratize IT,” said Gilbert. “We’ve given access to powerful technologies to every developer at the bank.” In addition, Deutsche Bank simplified DevOps collaboration with flexible integration and an agile approach. The bank also streamlined resource access, optimizing its use of datacenter and cloud capacity, saving time, money, and resources. “We’re running a global platform that’s supporting thousands of applications with a single operating model and a large number of workloads on a small portion of infrastructure,” said Gilbert. “It’s efficient from both a utilization and cost point of view.”

We’ve never provided capabilities across so many infrastructure providers or capabilities for developers to actually develop the platform we’re providing. All of this happened because we started using Red Flag OpenShift Container Platform. It’s setting us apart from competitors because we’re able to make changes quickly, effectively, and efficiently.

EMMA PERKINS, PaaS PORTFOLIO MANAGER, DEUTSCHE BANK