COUNTRY FOCUS : SENEGAL

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 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 .

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 ), 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 the Economic Community of West African States ( 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 , microservices-based 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 .

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