SBS Allies With Red Hat to Build Cloud-Native Banking Software
SBS has extended an existing alliance with Red Hat to now include the building and deployment of cloud-native applications running on the OpenShift platform.
Formerly known as Sopra Banking Software, a unit of Sopra Steria, a provider of IT services, SBS is a developer of software for automating backend processes for banking and financial services organizations. The former parent organization of SBS had established a relationship with Red Hat but that alliance is now being extended under SBS to create a cloud-native version of the SBS application portfolio using the Red Hat OpenShift Platform.
SBS CTO Xavier Rebeuf said the effort is part of a larger effort to build and deploy a software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of the SBS platform that can be deployed anywhere there are instances of Kubernetes clusters. That approach also makes it simpler for SBS customers to deploy individual application components using a more flexible microservices-based architecture rather than continuing to rely solely on a legacy monolithic application platform, he added.
Additionally, the alliance with Red Hat will provide SBS with access to emerging technologies such as large language models (LLMs) that will be used to automate a wide range of banking and financial services, he noted. It also should make it simpler for SBS to integrate with other external providers of services using a centralized integration service, noted Rebeuf.
It’s not clear to what degree organizations are opting to roll their own Kubernetes platforms versus standardizing on curated platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift. The one certain thing is that in time the number of organizations that have the required expertise required to maintain their own platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment is much smaller than the number of organizations that would generally prefer to standardize on one provided by a vendor such as Red Hat. In the case of SBS, for example, the decision to rely on Red Hat frees up more resources to write business logic that drives the value of its customers, noted Rebeuf.
Ultimately, each application development team will need to determine to what extent their developers are going to be best served by either a custom PaaS environment created and maintained by either a DevOps or platform engineering team or a more opinionated platform that requires them to accept certain restrictions in the name of reducing costs and potentially increasing productivity. The former approach enables organizations to theoretically create the perfect environment for the needs of their developers, while the latter approach relies more on licensed software and commercial support services that need to be added to the total cost of application development. In many cases, the existing application development platform is, of course, already considered a sunk cost that has already been incurred.
Regardless of approach, there is little doubt that organizations will be building and deploying more cloud-native applications even in sectors as conservative as banking. The only issue that remains to be resolved is how much of that software can be safely built using existing platforms versus considering an alternative approach that might not require as much effort to maintain.