Hisense accelerates systems by 3x with Red Hat technology

Headquartered in Qingdao, China, Hisense Group is a fast-growing business that operates in multimedia, home appliances, and intelligent IT systems. It recently began the process of transforming from a traditional home appliance and electronics manufacturer to a broader high-tech operator. Identifying the need to improve business delivery, resource utilization and development, Hisense adopted cloud computing as a key group strategy and started building a shared architecture. It implemented a platform based on Red Hat OpenShift after benchmarking with industry leaders. 

Benefits:

• Accelerated system implementation time by 3-5x
• Increased resource utilization by over 60% while cutting procurement costs
• Reduced manual environment setup times from 1-3 days to around 1 hour

Hisense is a fast-growing business that operates in multimedia, home appliances, and intelligent IT systems that is transitioning into a broader high-tech operator. Hisense’s traditional IT configuration was bulky and slowed them down. And, they were incurring high IT costs, made worse by numerous maintenance and licensing issues. This contributed to a slower output delivery, low resource utilization and inefficient development.

“We needed to improve our visibility into several business-critical processes and applications, with the primary aims of improving business delivery, resource utilization, reducing hardware procurement costs, and speeding up development of business apps,” said Qu Dong, Minister of Hisense Infrastructure and Cloud Service Management Department .

By using products such as Red Hat OpenShift, the Red Hat Application Services portfolio and Red Hat Consulting, Hisense has built a containers and Kubernetes-powered cloud platform that runs software components such as data ingestion and analytics tools, databases, and DevOps tools to speed up new service launches, support innovation, and enhance customer experience. A key objective here was to meet the requirements of business consultants, development, testing, operation and maintenance personnel, and managers to facilitate system construction, operation, maintenance, and visibility into key processes. 

The container application platform that Hisense implemented is built on Red Hat OpenShift, which is based on open source Kubernetes as its core. During implementation, the project team was particularly impressed by the rapid innovation and high levels of iteration capability from the open source community. “With Red Hat products and services, we were able to build a Kubernetes-powered cloud platform that scales when we need it to. We can now accelerate the secure deployment and management of our industrial workloads to enhance overall business agility,” said Qu Dong.

Red Hat Consulting ensured that the project implementation followed the correct plan in terms of system architecture design, project implementation and launch process. It also helped solve implementation problems quickly, ensuring that the project met critical quality and timeframe requirements and launched successfully.

Accelerated application delivery and system implementation by 3-5 times

By enabling Hisense to build new, agile, cloud-native applications, the system implementation cycle has been accelerated so it is 3–5 times faster. 

Increased resource utilization by over 60% while cutting procurement costs

The move to a cloud-based platform has significantly reduced Hisense’s reliance on bulky, inefficient hardware resources. This has led to a 60% increase in resource utilization and a sharp reduction in hardware procurement costs.

Reduced manual environment setup times from 1-3 days to around 1 hour

Automated system deployment has led to a substantial reduction in environment setup times. These processes, which used to take between one and three days, are now typically completed in around an hour. 

As well as helping Hisense reduce resource waste and increase utilization, the OpenShift-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has enabled the business to speed up new service launches, support ‘trial-and-error’ innovation, and enhance the wider customer experience. All these factors ultimately strengthen Hisense’s overall competitiveness.

Implementing a PaaS platform has delivered significant advantages over traditional virtualization and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), for the application development and operation and maintenance teams in each business unit. More Hisense departments are looking to adopt PaaS solutions as a result.