Brightly innovates with Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS

A global leader in intelligent asset management solutions, Brightly Software (Brightly) has been growing rapidly. To support that growth, the company needed to modernize its products’ legacy foundations and consolidate those products on a single platform. It began searching for a robust and scalable modern foundation. Brightly engaged in an intensive Red Hat Open Innovation Lab, where the companies explored Brightly’s technology needs and how its teams collaborate. Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS allows Brightly to accelerate innovation while improving efficiency and cutting costs. Red Hat Consulting brought Brightly’s teams together, enabling and boosting collaboration across the company.

Benefits:

• Accelerated the pace of innovation
• Provided customers with freedom of choice 
• Brought the team together by enhancing collaboration
• Addressed the challenges of remote working

Brightly Software (Brightly), a Siemens company, is the global leader in intelligent asset management solutions. More than 1000 Brightly employees around the globe serve more than 12,000 clients across diverse industries. “We focus on managing physical assets, helping people maintain those things that we all take for granted and use every day,” said Kevin Kemmerer, CEO of Brightly. “In a building, anything from the roofs to the HVAC system to the lighting. In municipalities, anything from the roads to the bridges and even the trees.” 

Brightly has grown rapidly over the last four to five years, mainly through acquisition. But while Brightly’s products are powerful, its technology foundation had aged with time and was impeding Brightly’s ability to bring innovations to the market. The company began looking for the best way to overcome its technical debt and built a platform to support further growth and allow Brightly to get new products and features out to clients as fast as possible. 

“Brightly has historically been a collection of products”, said Kemmerer. “A platform would bring Brightly’s products together for a seamless customer experience and it would also help developers by bringing together all the different pieces that make up their solutions.” 

A new platform and infrastructure would also support Brightly to accelerate its growth. “We need to be able to grow with our customers and do it in a standardized fashion that allows us to scale in a predictable way to give them the same level of service day in, day out, year in, year out,” said Ian McGonigle, Director of Cloud Operations at Brightly.

Brightly began searching the market for a foundation for its new platform. The foundation needed to enable portability between on-premises environments and the cloud. “We need to be able to address our customers’ needs from a GDPR or other regulation standpoint,” said McGonigle, “as well as if they need to be local on-premises for regulatory or security reasons.”

Red Hat invited Brightly to its Innovation Lab, where they explored Brightly’s business needs from the ground up, including its technology requirements and how the team collaborates to develop and deliver innovative offerings to its customers. “Red Hat brought in a team of people that partnered with our developers and architects,” said Kent Norton, CTO of Brightly. “They joined the team and helped them visualize the path to our future platform.” 

“The Innovation Lab is a community-driven, open source means of providing best practices and leveraging both the experience of Red Hat and the community abroad to drive innovation,” said McGonigle. The Lab practices empowered Brightly by pairing its teams directly with Red Hat experts to leverage their experience and culture and understand the best approaches to addressing various challenges. 

Together Brightly and Red Hat identified Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) as the optimal technology solution to optimize limited DevOps resources on a modernized, flexible platform. “ROSA allows us to focus our scarce DevOps resources on improving our applications and delivering automation to our software developers, instead of managing our Kubernetes-centric platform, patching it, securing it, improving it,” said Norton.

Accelerating innovation and gaining competitive advantages with ROSA

Built on ROSA, the new platform has also allowed Brightly to increase its pace of innovation. “ROSA gives us a broader competitive advantage by accelerating the pace at which we bring new products and solutions to the market,” said Kemmerer.

Red Hat has also helped Brightly drive efficiency and cost savings by homogenizing tools and simplifying Kubernetes with managed platform services. “The ROSA-managed service takes away one piece of our Kubernetes administration, giving us the freedom to tackle other challenges, especially ones that will make our lives better,” said McGonigle. “We can also onboard new acquisitions more efficiently and thoroughly than previously.”

Brightly provides customers with freedom of choice

As a cloud-agnostic platform, Red Hat OpenShift gives Brightly’s customers the freedom to choose the best technologies to make them as successful as possible. “With Red Hat OpenShift, our customers can go where they need to go, and we can go with them on their journey,” said McGonigle.

Brought the team together by enhancing collaboration

Red Hat Consulting helped Brightly normalize culture and practices across remote teams so they can collaborate more effectively. “Red Hat brought us together as a team,” said McGonigle. “We had a set of individuals who were already high performing and highly skilled. Red Hat helped them to become a successful team that knows how to empower each other. It creates a more collaborative, open, beneficial, and fun environment.”

Red Hat has taught Brightly a better way of working together. Together, they have created a space where everyone feels like they can be positive and open with each other, and focus on building the best platform for customers. 

Addressed the challenges of remote working 

Engaging in a Red Hat Innovation Lab helped Brightly embrace more of an Agile mindset while dealing with the challenges of being a global organization that mostly works remotely. With guidance from Red Hat Consulting, Brightly has addressed challenges relating to remote working, primarily by changing working patterns and practicing asynchronous stand-ups. 

“We’re now able to work together without losing velocity,” said McGonigle. “We can accommodate different time zones so people can work in their more natural, normal hours.”

Across the board, Brightly’s team has expressed the immense value they have each seen from working with Red Hat.

“Red Hat has taught us how to communicate more effectively across silos,” said Ashley Berenson, Vice President of Product Management at Brightly. “You’ve helped us understand the technologies that power our solutions so we can make them the most effective for our clients and our markets.” 

“Red Hat’s unique process brought to life a vision of how to get to our future platform. Red Hat has people who understand great and cloud-native best practice technologies and also the business. It has been transformative. I’ve never found anybody that does it better,” said Norton.

Red Hat has been a valued partner for Brightly on its journey to build the best platform to help it increase its pace of innovation: “When we sought a partner to help us do that, Red Hat was a clear choice. It’s been a wonderful relationship so far. We’re just getting started, and I’m looking forward to future successes,” said Kemmerer.