Aussie Broadband finds operational efficiency through SUSE cloud platform solutions
Telco uses the open source company to continue its migration and expansion plans.
Aussie Broadband has built a cloud-native private cloud platform leveraging SUSE’s technology to achieve 30 percent improvement in operational efficiency.
The telco is the fifth-largest retail internet provider in Australia, and its rapid expansion, through both organic growth and acquisitions, resulted in a fragmented tech stack.
Due to this fragmentation, Aussie Broadband launched a major IT transformation, with a goal to create a unified, scalable cloud hosting platform.
After evaluating options from Red Hat, VMware and Canonical, Aussie Broadband chose to swap its current proprietary solutions from VMware for SUSE due to its combination of performance, flexibility, and support.
Ben O’Shea, general manager transformation and cloud at Aussie Broadband said the telco needed a platform that could keep their core ISP and customer services arm running reliably, all while improving the efficiency of the systems their teams depended on.
He added another reason they chose SUSE as they already had some pockets of SUSE installations in other parts of the business.
"We had some existing skills and capability there, however, we ran a thorough evaluation process where we considered a number of different vendors and platforms, both commercial and open source,” O’Shea said.
“Through that evaluation we determined the SUSE platform and offering to be the best-fit for Aussie Broadband.”
O’Shea said the technical capabilities provided by their platform were “market-leading” and their support services pricing is "very competitive”.
“We were also really attracted to their 'flexibility and choice' ethos - we aren't locked into expensive contracts, we can pay for support for the components that are most critical, or not at all, if we so choose,” he explained.
“Customer references SUSE's software and support services were exceptional, which played a big part in the decision; as were the references for their implementation partner, Adfinis. This gave us the confidence they were the right partner for us.”
Implementation
Using SUSE Rancher Prime as the control plane, and building on RKE2, SUSE Virtualisation, SUSE Linux Micro, and SUSE Security, Aussie Broadband consolidated virtual machines and containerised workloads onto a single, unified platform.
The company now manages its technology assets with a single-pane-of-glass interface, improving visibility and performance across its operations.
“Delivering new virtual machines or new container instances can take anywhere from one to two days,” said O’Shea. “With the automation that we've been able to achieve on top of the SUSE platform, we've got that down to one to two hours.”
Through streamlining its data centre footprint, Aussie Broadband said it has achieved meaningful cost reductions across hardware, power, and software licensing.
“At the end of the day, SUSE has helped us achieve 20 to 30 percent efficiency on our day-to-day operations,” said O’Shea.
For the company’s 650,000 residential broadband users, the benefits are already being felt. According to Aussie Broadband, applications that support customer connections are now more reliable, resilient, and efficient.
“It directly impacts those end customers and translates into a more positive customer experience,” O’Shea added.
Further down the road
O’Shea explained that Aussie Broadband was looking for a partner that could provide them with a turn-key cloud platform solution that has telco-grade performance can scale with their needs and all in a cost-effective manner.
“The SUSE platform delivers us all of these things and being able to leverage their engineering expertise and delivery capability both internally and through partners like Adfinis to augment our internal teams really de-risks our implementation,” he added.
Now that they’ve implemented the solution, O’Shea explained the next steps.
“The build out of our core cloud hosting platform is the first step in a much larger program of technology transformation,” he said.
“We've got about 18 months worth of workload migration and legacy platform decommissionings ahead of us.”
O’Shea noted, “The platform provides the foundation for our OSS and BSS transformation initiatives and we'll be looking at how our customer-facing voice platforms can start to leverage the advantages of the new platform.
“As we move through these pieces of work, we'll be scaling the platform out and expanding into new data centres. We've got a very exciting program of work ahead of us.”
Aussie Broadband and SUSE have been working together for about two years now.
“Initially on some smaller use cases and for the last 18 months or so, on our core cloud hosting platform project,” O’Shea explained.
To support the transformation, Aussie Broadband also adopted SUSE Consulting Services and SUSE Platinum eLearning to ensure enterprise-level support and expert guidance throughout the transformation process.
Ben Henshall, general manager, Australia & New Zealand at SUSE said, “Simple, scalable, and built for growth, Aussie Broadband is showing how open source can power smarter telco operations.”
Looking ahead, Aussie Broadband is continuing to expand its Kubernetes footprint, with deployments planned across more than ten facilities in five states.
The company is also exploring SUSE telco edge solutions to support strategic edge deployments, enhancing critical ISP workloads, and are exploring AI capabilities with the SUSE AI platform to drive further innovation.
Founded in a regional Victorian living room in 2003, Aussie Broadband has grown into a publicly listed company with over 780,000 broadband connections, a team of more than 1,300 staff.