Michael Ferris Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer | Red Hat
Michael Ferris Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer | Red Hat
Red Hat, a global leader in open source solutions, has announced that Safaricom, a major communication provider in Kenya, is utilizing Red Hat OpenShift as a unified cloud platform for its applications, including the M-PESA system. This initiative aims to enhance Safaricom's IT capabilities and improve financial inclusion for millions of customers.
Safaricom serves over 45 million subscribers with extensive mobile network coverage in Kenya. The company manages crucial applications requiring high stability and uptime, including those linked to the M-PESA platform—a mobile payment system used by 51 million customers across Africa. This system facilitates transactions exceeding $314 billion annually, promoting financial inclusion for unbanked populations.
To achieve its goal of becoming Africa’s leading purpose-driven technology company by 2025, Safaricom decided to transition from traditional infrastructures to a cloud-native architecture using containers and microservices. This new setup offers a flexible and stable foundation to support digital growth.
Previously relying on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Satellite for infrastructure management, Safaricom initially adopted Kubernetes but encountered stability issues. Consequently, they shifted to Red Hat OpenShift due to its production-ready maturity and enterprise-grade support.
Safaricom collaborated with Copy Cat Group and Red Hat to deploy this platform and modernize its applications. This included technical workshops aimed at aligning processes across various teams within Safaricom. In 2024, Safaricom expanded its use of Red Hat technologies to include advanced security features and scalable registry platforms for managing content globally.
Currently, Red Hat OpenShift underpins about 70% of Safaricom’s tier 1 and tier 2 applications. The transition has led to improvements such as enhanced customer experience, greater platform stability with up to 99.98% availability compared to the previous 93%, faster deployment times, increased automation efficiency, improved scalability for handling traffic peaks, and additional security capabilities.
Looking forward, Safaricom is exploring opportunities to extend these benefits into their network space by expanding the use of Red Hat OpenShift into areas like their 5G core.
Fran Heeran from Red Hat expressed satisfaction in collaborating with Safaricom on this modernization project: “We are pleased to be collaborating closely with Safaricom as one team on its modernisation project with Red Hat OpenShift as its common platform for developing and deploying applications at scale.”
Duncan Kabira Ndirangu from Safaricom highlighted the strategic partnership: “We are glad to have Red Hat as a strategic partner...This has given our teams the confidence to deploy cloud-native applications.”
James Maitai also emphasized the partnership's impact: “Red Hat has been a pivotal partner...As we continue to evolve into a techco...exploring new opportunities.”
Safaricom remains committed to enhancing its technological infrastructure while driving innovation and value for its customers across Africa.
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