Red Hat Helps Ortec Finance Accelerate Growth and Time to Market

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Ortec Finance, a leading global provider of technology and solutions for risk and return management, has built a cloud-native platform for solutions delivery using Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift. Using managed OpenShift has enabled Ortec Finance to continue growing its business while at the same time enhancing operational consistency and efficiency to improve product quality.

Ortec Finance provides software solutions to pension funds, insurance companies, asset managers and wealth management companies, helping over 600 customers across more than 20 countries balance risk-and-return tradeoffs and improve investment decision-making. In service of its mission to continuously optimize how it serves its clients, Ortec Finance embarked on a technology transformation to cloud-native applications.

Ortec Finance collaborated with HCS Company to build the Ortec Finance Cloud Application (ORCA) Platform, choosing Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, as its foundation. While piloting the first product, it became clear that Ortec Finance needed a complete, fully managed platform, which led it to implement Azure Red Hat OpenShift. Running on Azure Red Hat OpenShift gave Ortec Finance’s solution engineers and customers the ability to more efficiently deploy software, oversee access and authorization and manage applications across multiple Kubernetes clusters. Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides Ortec Finance with a comprehensive application platform offering a wider choice of integrated and pre-validated tools for developers.

With its move to the new cloud-native platform, Ortec Finance onboarded its Global Wealth Solutions team to modernize and migrate OPAL, a solution suite enabling advisors in the bank and wealth management industry to efficiently plan and monitor the financial goals of their clients with realistic insights. OPAL offers realistic projections of how an individual client’s investment portfolio will develop, allowing for timely course corrections caused by changes in financial situations, financial markets or portfolio performance. Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides OPAL with the power to easily and cost-effectively scale clusters as demand requires and deploy the application in any region as needed to comply with local regulations. Azure Red Hat OpenShift helps to increase productivity and quality via automation, boost performance for the application, and provide economic efficiencies.

With Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Ortec Finance can deliver higher quality software faster: for example, its delivery lead times have been reduced from days to minutes, thanks to the ability to release without human handovers. Ortec Finance sees Azure Red Hat OpenShift as a future-ready platform, ultimately enabling business growth and positioning it better to respond to the changing market.

In light of new EU regulations that require companies to report on sustainability practices, Ortec Finance relied on Red Hat for support in measuring and understanding the environmental impact of its cloud computing efforts. The ability to spin up and manage Azure Red Hat OpenShift clusters in multiple regions allows for infrastructure elasticity based on user workloads and local energy grid carbon intensity. Ortec Finance has also used the Red Hat-led open source project Kepler (Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter) to better observe, analyze, document and optimize the energy consumption of cloud-native applications.

For the past two years, Ortec Finance has been successful in serving machine learning (ML) models for residential housing valuations on Azure Red Hat OpenShift, supporting its institutional clients in efficient appraisal processes. Now, the company is in the process of adopting Red Hat OpenShift AI to replace its maintenance efforts and proprietary code for AI model serving in its applications. Red Hat OpenShift AI will provide Ortec Finance with a flexible environment that enables data acquisition and preparation, model training and fine-tuning, model serving and monitoring, and hardware acceleration. As Ortec Finance continues innovating the ORCA platform, the supported integration of Red Hat OpenShift AI’s capabilities with Azure Red Hat OpenShift will help speed up the implementation of AI/ML-enabled applications in compliance with regulatory requirements.  

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Supporting Quotes

Marcel Timmer, country manager, The Netherlands, Red Hat

“Enterprises across industries, especially highly regulated financial services firms, are looking for the right balance between cloud scale and central visibility and control – Ortec Finance is addressing this with the help of Red Hat’s managed cloud services. We are excited to see the strides in efficiency and speed to market that Ortec Finance is making with Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift. Ortec Finance is forward-thinking around how AI-powered solutions can help generate improvements in customer service, operational efficiency and resilience with the help of Red Hat OpenShift AI.”

Joris Cramwinckel, technologist, Ortec Finance

“Azure Red Hat OpenShift gives us all the flexibility and self-service of a vendor-neutral cloud-native platform, together with the support and firepower of a managed service. Modernizing our workloads and unifying our teams on Azure Red Hat OpenShift is already helping us be a faster-moving business and we can see how OpenShift AI on Azure Red Hat OpenShift will accelerate the transition of our AI-enhanced solutions from research and development labs into the hands of customers. We are happy to see Red Hat embracing the open source KServe project with the OpenShift AI operator, which will help us apply AI to bring greater efficiencies and innovation, augmenting the business value we can gain from Azure Red Hat OpenShift. The platform addresses our goals of today and fuels our technology successes for the future.”

Klaas-Pieter Majoor, managing partner and CTO, HCS Company

“When the best ideas win, nobody loses. It has been a true privilege to help guide Ortec Finance on its open source journey as a trusted advisor from the beginning until today. After a careful requirements and selection phase of several managed service providers, we recommended Azure Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat and Microsoft’s technology combined with the industry knowledge of Ortec Finance helps create leading solutions in the market. We are proud to work together and to continue doing so in the coming years.”