Royal Bank of Scotland Powers Open Experience with Red Hat Mobile, Container and Cloud Technologies

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced that Royal Bank of Scotland is powering its new Open Experience center with Red Hat technologies, including the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform and OpenShift Enterprise, Red Hat’s web-scale container application platform.

Open Experience is a technology solutions center launched by Royal Bank of Scotland in February 2016 at its headquarters in Edinburgh, U.K., to pursue innovative new technologies for the bank and its customers. Not only a physical space, Open Experience represents a new way of thinking to help Royal Bank of Scotland develop innovative products and services within a framework that promotes closer, more collaborative work between colleagues, businesses, and customers.

The Open Experience’s team of experts is working with financial technology companies to develop new ideas and grow them into customer pilots, as well as searching for emerging trends and technologies around the globe.

The Open Experience center sits alongside the bank’s Entrepreneurial Spark business accelerator hub, which includes a ‘Hatchery’ for early stage startups and a ‘Nest’ for high growth businesses, giving the accelerator’s participants access to Open Experience’s technologies and innovations. Since it launched in 2011, the Entrepreneurial Spark accelerator has supported more than 660 businesses.

Using OpenShift, Red Hat’s award-winning container-based application platform, the bank’s Open Experience developers can more quickly develop, host, and scale applications in a cloud environment. OpenShift’s elastic, multi-language, container and Kubernetes-based architecture automates the provisioning, management and scaling of applications, so developers can focus on writing the application code for their business, startup or next big idea. OpenShift’s support for multiple languages and frameworks, databases and development tools, offer a lower barrier to entry, so developers can start their project more easily and start coding faster, using the languages and tools they already know and prefer.

Mobile is foundational to enabling digital transformation and innovation in the modern enterprise because of its capability to profoundly change business models, processes, and the customer experience. The security and integration of back-end data for mobile apps should be of the utmost priority, and mobile application platforms can be an integral component for efficient development and deployment of back-end services for mobile applications. Red Hat Mobile Application Platform provides participants with award-winning technology designed to simplify the development, integration, deployment, and management of mobile solutions.

Royal Bank of Scotland anticipates expanding its relationship with Red Hat to bring additional technologies from the open source leader available to Open Experience in the future.

Craig Muzilla, senior vice president, Application Platforms Business Group – Red Hat, “Innovation and community have long been hallmarks of open source, and we have seen firsthand the power of creating technology the open source way. We laud Royal Bank of Scotland’s commitment to creating an open environment where innovation can thrive, and are honored to play a part in helping launch the next generation of ideas into the marketplace.”

Richard Crook, head of innovation engineering, Royal Bank of Scotland, “With Open Experience we spike, challenge and dream. We are makers, thinkers, and builders. We are pleased to be collaborating with Red Hat to provide an innovation platform for our innovation engineers. The use of Red Hat Mobile Application Platform and OpenShift Enterprise enables us to maximize the chances of our best ideas reaching the hands of our customers.”

Simon Johnson, head of infrastructure strategy and architecture, Royal Bank of Scotland, “By leveraging Red Hat’s OpenShift and mobile software were we able to help support the Open Experience. The infrastructure spike we ran, supported by Red Hat, was critical in helping to build our innovation platform for Open Experience.”