CloudSphere vs Red Hat OpenShift comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between CloudSphere and Red Hat OpenShift based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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Buyer's Guide

Cloud Migration

June 2024

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IBM Turbonomic

Featured Reviews

Dan Ambrose

Infrastructure Engineer 4 at Hyland

Feb 6, 2024

Helps visibility, bridges the data gap, and frees up time

We use IBM Turbonomic in a hybrid cloud environment. Although it supports multi-cloud capabilities, we currently operate in a single-cloud setting. Turbonomic offers visibility into our environment's performance, spanning across applications, underlying infrastructure, and protection resources. The visibility and analytics help to bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams such as applications and infrastructure. This is important for awareness collaboration, cost saving, and helping to design and improve our application. Enhanced visibility and data analytics have contributed to a significant reduction in our mean time to resolve. Tools like Turbonomic provide crucial visualization and insights, empowering us to make data-driven decisions instead of relying on assumptions as we did before. This newfound transparency translates to a massive improvement, going from complete darkness to having a clear 100 percent view of the situation. Although our applications are not optimized for the cloud we have seen some improvement in response time. IBM Turbonomic empowers us to achieve more with fewer people thanks to automation. Previously, customers frequently contacted us requesting resource increases to resolve issues. Now, we have a tool that allows us to objectively assess their needs, leading to a deeper understanding of our applications. This solution also generates significant cost savings in the cloud and optimizes hardware utilization within our data centers. Its AI algorithm intelligently allocates servers on hosts, maximizing efficiency without compromising performance. By fine-tuning resource allocation without causing performance bottlenecks, Turbonomic extends the lifespan of existing hardware, postponing the need for new purchases. This effectively stretches our capital expenditure budget. We started to see the benefits of IBM Turbonomic within the first 60 days. IBM is a fantastic partner. Their tech support has been outstanding, and the product itself is excellent - a very solid offering. By automating resource management with Turbonomic, our engineers are freed up to focus on more strategic initiatives like innovation and ongoing organizational projects. Previously, manually adding resources was a time-consuming process that interrupted workflows. Now, automation handles scaling efficiently, saving us thousands of man-hours and significant costs. It has illuminated the need for SetOps. It has highlighted areas of overspending, and the actions we've taken have demonstrated significant cost savings. IBM Turbonomic has positively impacted our overall application performance. IBM Turbonomic has helped reduce both CAPEX and OPEX. It has also significantly reduced cloud build times.

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Vibhor Gupta

Migration Customer Solution Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Aug 1, 2022

Great discovery, good support, and generally reliable

The area they need to focus most on is the capability of assessment and the landing zones. It’s lacking right now. Cloud transformation has four to five cases, including planning, discovery, assessment, and the MVC, which is called the minimal viable cloud. That comes with the architecture design or landing zone creation, where we will create resources on the cloud which we are provisioning. If we are moving onto the cloud platform, AWS, or zero GCP, we need an account. We need resources to be able to compute the network. Most organizations have their landing zone process and know how to create the resources account, compute the network layer and the security layer. However, this landing zone creation is not there in CloudSphere as a feature. It cannot create any of the cloud providers' accounts or their network security computing as a part of the orchestration layer. That orchestration layer is missing in this product. It will not discover all the applications, although they also have the catalog. They are constantly announcing their catalog to identify applications based on the service which we are discovering. 50% of the time, the application will discover automatically. However, for the other 50%, we need to find the application based on its running process. That's the automation method that we need to follow and that they call blueprint. We need to create those blueprints and then we need to tag those applications. That is the one process that takes time when we do the discovery. One of the cons of this product is that it will not discover all the applications running. It will not discover SAP or some kinds of applications that are running on those inside the application of the servers as well. When we start the scanning of, for example, 500 servers, it will not handle the scan. We need to differentiate the jobs - for example, one job for 100 servers, a second job for another 100 servers, et cetera. We cannot scan the 1,000 servers together. That causes it to take time. There’s a graph missing. It shows where all the servers have interdependencies; however, when we do actual work, it will not work properly in terms of what we present to the customer.

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AbhinavSingh

Technical Marketing Engineer - Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures at NetApp

Apr 26, 2023

OperatorHub provides certified applications, helping us reduce time to market

The most valuable feature of OpenShift is the security context constraint (SCC). The solution’s security throughout the stack is good. And security context constraints provide port-level security. It's a granular level of control, where you can give privileges to certain users to work on certain applications. That's a great security feature. The solution also provides a lot of security features on top of a regular Kubernetes cluster, which you can control. For example, in the namespace of OpenShift, there are different kinds of access levels. If you have a development team, you can provide limited access so that a developer can only deploy your application. If you're running any business-critical app, you can restrict the users' access to that app. Also, Red Hat provides advanced multi-cluster management. You can manage multiple clouds with one solution, and I'm happy with that.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."

"The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."

"It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get."

"I like the analytics that help us optimize compatibility. Whereas Azure Advisor tells us what we have to do, Turbonomic has automation which actually does those things. That means we don't have to be present to get them done and simplifies our IT engineers' jobs."

"The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature."

"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."

"Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation."

"I like Turbonomic's built-in reporting. It provides a ton of information out of the box, so I don't have to build panels for the monthly summaries and other reports I need to present to management. We get better performance and bottleneck reporting from this than we do from our older EMC software."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"For the customers I work with, it provides flexibility as far as storage is concerned, so it's security and access."

"The product is helpful for the management, optimization, and utilization of resources."

"We do not need to install any appliances or any agents."

"Provides multiple kinds of services for managing the clouds of multiple customers."

"When I started using CloudSphere, it wasn't mature, and it had multiple issues. For example, my team experienced server issues while using the solution, but recently, I noticed how much CloudSphere has improved. There used to be some latency issues with CloudSphere. It even gave error messages in the past when you select an option such as "the web server is not responding", but it has improved a lot, and now I don't get any errors from CloudSphere. What I like best about CloudSphere is that it has a lot of beneficial features, and it has a single pane for managing multi-cloud environments, which I find very helpful, and it's the main benefit you can get from CloudSphere."

"Two stand-out features are the security model and value-add features that don't exist in Upstream Kubernetes."

"I have seen a return on investment, and it depends upon the types and the nature of some of the most critical applications that have been hosted on the OpenShift infrastructure."

"The security features of OpenShift are strong when in use of role-based access."

"Scaling and uptime of the applications are positives."

"We have found the cluster management function to be very good with this product."

"The security is good."

"It's cloud agnostic and the containerization and security features are outstanding."

"Excellent GUI support, so one does not need to use the command line client for almost any tasks. Great support for building images directly from Git repositories with hooks."

More Red Hat OpenShift pros

Cons

"We're still evaluating the solution, so I don't know enough about what I don't know. They've done a lot over the years. I used Turbonomics six or seven years ago before IBM bought them. They've matured a lot since then."

"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."

"The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens."

"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."

"Additional interfaces would be helpful."

"Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development."

"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."

"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"The solution must have a single management console for the resources and VMs."

"When we start the scanning of, for example, 500 servers, it will not handle the scan. We need to differentiate the jobs - for example, one job for 100 servers, a second job for another 100 servers, et cetera."

"The main issue I experienced from CloudSphere was recently resolved, but an area for improvement in the solution is that it lacks the functionality of migrating resources from one public cloud to another. If CloudSphere could provide that functionality, that would be very beneficial to users and companies."

"There are quite a number of services that can't be deployed using CloudSphere."

"The next feature I would like to have full disclosure of what's being done with the data."

"The platform's documentation could be more comprehensive to cover the full spectrum of user needs. Sometimes, achieving specific goals is challenging due to a lack of detailed guidance."

"This solution could be improved by offering best practices on standardization and additional guidance on how to use this solution."

"It would be great if it supported Bitbucket repositories too."

"The metrics in OpenShift can use improvement."

"The monitoring part could be better to monitor the performance."

"The latest 4.0 version of OpenShift disabled a few of the features we previously made use of, although this wasn't a huge deal."

"My team has found some bugs in OpenShift due to continuous integration, and this is an area for improvement in the platform. RedHat should fix the bugs. Another area for improvement in OpenShift is that upgrading clusters can be challenging, resulting in downtime. Application support also needs improvement in OpenShift because the platform doesn't support all applications in the cloud. I'd like upgraded storage in the next release of OpenShift, especially when I need to do a DR exercise. It would also be good if the platform allows mirroring with another cluster, or more portability in terms of moving applications to another cluster."

"The whole area around the hybrid cloud could be improved. I would like to deploy a Red Hat OpenShift cluster on-premise and on the cloud, then have Red Hat do the entire hybrid cloud management."

More Red Hat OpenShift cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."

"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."

"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."

"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."

"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."

"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."

"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."

"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"The product is very expensive."

"It depends on how that model will be used. It might be anywhere between $4 and $15 per license per month. It’s less expensive than other options."

"Depending on the extent of the product use, licenses are available for a range of time periods, and are renewable at the end of the period."

"It's important to start small because the solution is scalable. We can build our cluster and look at the bundle option, not the external subscriptions. Talking to the people at Red Hat can save us money."

"We use the license-free version of Red Hat Openshift but we pay for the support."

"We had a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) license for all our servers' operating systems. By having multiple Red Hat products together, you can negotiate costs and leverage on having a sort of enterprise license agreement to reduce the overall outlay or TCO."

"The solution is cost-effective."

"We are currently using the open version, OKD. We plan to get the enterprise version in the future."

"The cost is quite high."

"The licensing cost for OpenShift is expensive when compared to other products. RedHat also charges you additional costs apart from the standard licensing fees."

More Red Hat OpenShift pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Comms Service Provider

University

Financial Services Firm

33%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?

I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company be...

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What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can a...

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What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?

I mostly provide it to my clients. There are multiple reasons why they would use it depending on the client's needs a...

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What do you like most about CloudSphere?

The product is helpful for the management, optimization, and utilization of resources.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for CloudSphere?

I use the solution for our hyper-converged infrastructure within the organization for hospital management. We also ac...

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What advice do you have for others considering CloudSphere?

We have a FortiGate license. The product is very good. The technical support is also very good. If the solution provi...

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How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?

Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderfu...

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Which would you recommend - Pivotal Cloud Foundry or OpenShift?

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a cloud-native application platform to simplify app delivery. It is efficient and effective....

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What do you like most about OpenShift?

OpenShift facilitates DevOps practices and improves CI/CD workflows in terms of stability compared to Jenkins.

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 20% of the time

Azure Cost Management vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 12% of the time

Cisco Intersight vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 10% of the time

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 8% of the time

VMware vSphere vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 7% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

SkyKick Cloud Manager vs CloudSphere

Compared 52% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs CloudSphere

Compared 48% of the time

More CloudSphere Competitors

Amazon AWS vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 25% of the time

Pivotal Cloud Foundry vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Azure vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 16% of the time

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 12% of the time

Google Cloud vs Red Hat OpenShift

Compared 10% of the time

More Red Hat OpenShift Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Turbonomic

June 2024

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Buyer's Guide

CloudSphere

June 2024

Download CloudSphere product report

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat OpenShift

June 2024

Download Red Hat OpenShift product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

HyperCloud

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IBM

CloudSphere

Red Hat

Interactive Demo

IBM

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CloudSphere

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Red Hat

Overview

IBM Turbonomic is a performance and cost optimization platform for public, private, and hybrid clouds used by customers to assure application performance while eliminating inefficiencies by dynamically resourcing applications through automated actions. Common use cases include cloud cost optimization, cloud migration planning, data center modernization, FinOps acceleration, Kubernetes optimization, sustainable IT, and application resource management. Turbonomic customers report an average 33% reduction in cloud and infrastructure waste without impacting application performance, and return-on-investment of 471% over three years. Ready to take a closer look? Explore the interactive demo or start your free 30-day trial today!

CloudSphere is an intelligent cloud management platform that enables organizations to plan, optimize, secure, and scale their cloud adoption. The platform has three solutions to help organizations manage dynamic, multi-cloud environments, including cloud migration planning, cloud cost management, and cloud security posture management. By using application intelligence (AI), the platform is able to discover and collect all of the data points that collectively define an application across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. Because the solution is very scalable, it can accommodate companies of all sizes.

The CloudSphere solution is ideal for:

SMBs
Enterprises
Government
ISVs
Managed service providers

CloudSphere Product Highlights

CloudSphere has a unique data science approach to hybrid and multi-cloud cyber asset management that offers the only solution to automate the discovery and creation of a top-down, application-level graphical view of your organization’s cyber assets.

With its continuous application graphing, CloudSphere can save countless hours and provides the visibility to optimize your IT environment without triggering unforeseen business risks or disrupting other applications.

The platform’s visualization capabilities accelerate cloud migration, transformation, and modernization initiatives with real-time insights and optimization recommendations.

CloudSphere’s security posture monitoring minimizes cyber security exposure and reduces risk from misconfigurations.

Automating compliance monitoring for corporate policies and key industry standards makes reporting extremely easy. The solution’s context-aware policy engine builds on the platform’s continuous visibility capabilities to display real-time compliance status and reports.

CloudSphere Features

CloudSphere has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Access controls/permissions
Billing
Provisioning
Capacity analytics
Cost management
Demand monitoring
Multi-cloud management
Performance analysis
Service level agreement (SLA) management
Workflow approval

CloudSphere Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing CloudSphere. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduce migration risk: With CloudSphere, you can migrate complex applications with agentless discovery of application interdependencies while optimizing for both cost and performance.

Manage your budget more efficiently: CloudSphere generates reports and provides alerts for cloud spend by group, department, project, or individual so you can keep your organization’s budgets on track.

Access controls: With CloudSphere’s visual maps, identity and access data is displayed to show who has access to key cloud resources.

Minimize attacks: The solution helps your organization establish better security and minimize cloud attack surface and your exposure window by using customizable risk scoring, remediation recommendations, and integration with 3rd-party reporting tools.

Ensure compliance: CloudSphere allows you to control cloud security risks and ensure compliance in complex hybrid and multi-cloud deployments with real-time visibility, continuous configuration monitoring, and user controlled auto remediation capabilities.

Comprehensive end-to-end view of your applications: CloudSphere gives you a comprehensive end-to-end view of your applications, regardless of your apps’ complexity, in order to provide optimization and accuracy throughout the migration process.

Policy-driven controls for cloud spending: The CloudSphere platform provides policy-driven controls for cloud spending along with visibility so you can properly budget for cloud usage and tie cloud infrastructure spending to business outcomes. The solution enables you to set and track budgets, configure alerts, allows users to take corrective action from trend reports, and helps you optimize cloud spending with continuous resource monitoring and rightsizing suggestions.

OpenShift is Red Hat's Kubernetes platform that provides a cloud environment for development, hosting, and scaling applications. The solution enables a cloud-like experience regardless of the location where it has been deployed, including in the cloud, on premises, or at the edge. It allows developers to select where to build, deploy, and run applications through a consistent experience, supported by full-stack automated operations, and self-service provisioning.

OpenShift employs an open hybrid cloud strategy which is built on the foundation of technologies including Linux, containers, and automation. This approach provides clients with a flexible selection of where to run their applications. Applications can be built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and are automatically compatible with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. OpenShift enables automation inside and outside clients' Kubernetes clusters.

The solution works with traditional, modernized, and cloud-native applications. It supports a wide variety of workloads, including Java, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), and databases. Due to the vast ecosystem of technology partners that OpenShift supports, clients can benefit from automated deployment and life-cycle management. This product improves the security of the full application life cycle by decreasing operational risk. This is achieved by shifting security left and automating development, security, and operations (DevSecOps).

OpenShift Features

OpenShift facilitates clients’ application-running processes through various features. Some of the product’s features include:

Backup and recovery: This feature ensures logical and physical protection through containers, Kubernetes, and serverless present opportunities. It is used to meet recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).
CI/CD pipelines: This feature of OpenShift automates the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, accelerating the time for application development.
GitOps: The GitOps feature increases security and reliability for applications through tools like Git repositories, Kubernetes, and CI/CD. The product includes this feature to allow developers more freedom in app development through tracing and accounting for the application life cycle in the Git repository.
Helm: Helm is a package and installs manager that simplifies the deployment of containerized apps. It is included in the features of OpenShift to assist users with interoperability and support cloud-native applications from independent software vendors (ISVs).
Sandboxed containers: OpenShift offers sandboxed containers based on Kata Containers to provide an additional layer of isolation for applications while meeting high-security requirements.
Windows containers: The product offers this feature to facilitate users when running their Windows applications by providing them a scheduled, orchestrated, and managed environment.
Security: OpenShift offers various operations through which clients can ensure the safety of their data and applications. They include container host and platform multitenancy, security and trusted content sources, security of the container registry, the build pipeline, and data, managing security container deployments, and more.
Service Mesh: This feature provides a uniform way for clients to connect, manage, and observe microservices-based applications. It also provides detailed behavioral insight.
Operators: This feature automates the development, configuration, and management of Kubernetes-native applications.
Virtualization: OpenShift allows users to run and manage virtual machine (VM) and container workloads side by side.

OpenShift Benefits

OpenShift provides the companies and users utilizing it with various benefits. These benefits include the following:

OpenShift provides scalability for applications, allowing them to run across hundreds of nodes in seconds.
The product offers flexibility by simplifying the deployment and management of hybrid infrastructure and providing self-managed or fully-managed service.
OpenShift incorporates open-source technologies alongside its native components and features.
The product enhances the developer experience by offering a variety of tools, multi language support, and integrated development environment (IDE) integrations.
The solution supports automated installation and over-the-air platform upgrades in the cloud with Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, as well as various on-premise platforms.
OpenShift includes streamlined and automated container and app builds, as well as health management and scaling.
The solution enhances the support of smaller-footprint topologies in edge scenarios.
OpenShift provides easy multiple cluster management through Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.
The product has enhanced security capabilities that include access controls, an enterprise registry with a built-in scanner, and networking.
The solution supports a wide spectrum of enterprise storage solutions for running stateful as well as stateless apps.

Reviews from Real Users

An executive head of department - M-PESA Tech at a comms service provider gives OpenShift a high rating because its automation can go a long way in reducing time to market and the time required to fix issues that arise from deployment.

Vikram C., head of infrastructure & cloud ops at a comms service provider, rates highly three qualities of OpenShift, summarizing them to mature, seamless integration, and easy setup.

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

Affymetrix, Bell Helicopter, Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe, Porterville Unified School District, Interact for Health, VirtueCom, Warren Memorial Hospital, Front Porch, RMH Group, Meyers Nave, Intraworks, Information Technology, ETTE, Clackamas Community College

UPS, Cathay Pacific, Hilton

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