Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Poste Italiane Group (“Poste Italiane” or the “Group”) is building an innovation platform based on Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio, including Red Hat OpenShift. The platform is intended to support more and deeper connections with ecosystem partners, provide a more seamless customer experience to the Group’s 35 million customers along with access to an extensive, timely product and services portfolio, and support Italy’s growing digital economy.
With Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies we have been able to create a reliable, high performance platform that helps us be more adaptable to meet demands, however unexpected, and to deliver the best possible experiences and opportunities for customers.
In the midst of a five-year business transformation strategy, Poste Italiane aims to improve operations for its 125,000-strong workforce, delivering greater value to its users through enhanced offerings and serve as a hub for ecosystem innovation. The 158-year old organization serves citizen, business and public administration customers with services that span financial, insurance, payments, mobile telecommunications and logistics segments, forming an integral part of Italy’s social and economic fabric. It is the largest service distribution network in Italy, delivering 150 million parcels per year, approximately 2.7 billion mail items and managing €548 billion of clients’ financial assets.
As part of its multi-year business transformation, the Group adopted a scalable microservices architecture and embraced agile working practices including DevOps. Poste Italiane chose Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, as a common foundation across the business, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its hybrid cloud backbone. Poste Italiane collaborated with Red Hat Consulting on the design, implementation and management of its Red Hat OpenShift-based platform. To support accelerated cloud-native application development, Poste Italiane deployed Red Hat Runtimes, Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage and Red Hat Ceph Storage. Poste Italiane is using Red Hat AMQ (part of Red Hat Integration) to connect heterogeneous applications, data and devices, and Red Hat Process Automation for faster workflows for financial services delivered over its digital channels.
With its new platform, Poste Italiane can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure and has dramatically reduced delivery time of business applications. The Group can now bring to market new applications in 2-4 months compared to the 6-12 months it took previously. The success of its new approach has helped Poste Italiane grow its digital customer base from 1.3 million daily online users in 2017 to 2.6 million daily online users as of June 2020, with digital transactions increasing 64% following the COVID-19 emergency.
Poste Italiane is now able to foster greater ecosystem collaboration in financial services and other industries to create new customer experiences. For example, taking advantage of the European Union revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), Poste Italiane can use open APIs and open banking standards to connect third party providers to its test environment on OpenShift to perform systems integration checks before going live. It is now working with a number of fintechs and startups in Italy and beyond to create joint propositions for customers and has been able to bring these to market faster than before. Newly launched offerings include:
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A QR code solution for simplifying digital payments;
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Bundled offers of payment and mobile phone services using convergence between the two;
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An expanded network of parcel delivery and collection points (more than 7,000);
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Personalized and scheduled premium delivery services;
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More effective management of full track long-haul road freight transportation; and
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Digital wealth management products.
As the Group builds out the platform’s capabilities and scope, its collaboration with Red Hat has continued, including through remotely delivered consulting services. Its plans include containerization at the edge to improve efficiency, performance and operational continuity of data and computing resources at distributed sites such as its mail sorting centres.
