Roche’s IT Centre of Excellence provides global IT services, including research and development, computer services and support, and infrastructure support. Roche wanted to update the Centre’s middleware platform to improve the efficiency of its infrastructure by reducing developer workload and time to market, improving the supply of infrastructures, and accelerating the development of applications. Roche also needed to reduce vendor dependency, increase flexibility, and lower costs.

With its prior application server solution, Roche had to use the manufacturer’s complete stack. This vendor dependency led to a significant rise in costs and limited flexibility and innovation. "With the current platform, we can choose the Red Hat technologies we need, and combine them with solutions from other providers, giving us even more functionality. Now, we can create our own infrastructure, mixing technology and solutions. This is very valuable to our company," said Justo Stoll, integration, middleware, and application services domain head at Roche.

“From Madrid, we can provide services to the global Roche network,” said César Infantes, middleware senior engineer at Roche. “It is very important for us to distribute our applications very quickly, and with Red Hat we can. With just a few administrators, we in Madrid can manage all the datacenters in both Europe and the United States." Its new solution allows the company to automate and standardize its infrastructure deployment processes. Now developers can deploy software more quickly—in days rather than weeks. “Today, our developers are much happier,” said Infantes.