Gates builds unified platform for AI with Red Hat OpenShift

Moving the business forward with greater consistency and standardization

As a global manufacturer, Gates needs a technology strategy capable of moving the business forward and making it easier for customers to do business. With ambitions to cement manufacturing leadership for the next 100 years, the company knew it needed to build the right technology foundations, which meant a flexible infrastructure that could support innovation and agility.

Gates also needed to support growth, including both organic expansion and inorganic opportunities.For example, following a recent agreement to acquire, the company needed to be able to rapidly prepare to integrate new entities.

Historically, Gates had operated a sprawling technology infrastructure across the globe, built predominantly on traditional Windows virtual machine (VM) environments and reliant on numerousdisparate systems and tools, which added complexity.

“We are on a journey to simplify technology and make the company faster and more dynamic,” said Diego Silva, Senior Vice President, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Gates. “We are tryingto increase consistency and standardization, because one of the things that the business needs rightnow is speed, and complexity is the enemy of speed.”

With increasing reliance on AI in its manufacturing processes, Gates also needed an environment that allowed it to run and deploy AI workloads in the cloud, on premise, and at the edge, with the flexibilityto shift them from one place to another to align with evolving business demands.

Managing VMs and containers via a unified platform

To simplify its environment and support innovation, Gates has standardized on Red Hat OpenShift as a unified foundation to build, modernize, and deploy applications at scale.

“We selected Red Hat OpenShift as it allows us to meet our requirements around flexibility and cost control,” said Silva. “It has the safeguards and governance we need, offering a curated open source environment that’s enterprise-ready and makes us feel safe about what we are doing.”

Red Hat OpenShift also supports Gates’s requirements around data sovereignty, combining an open source approach with enterprise support and services.

As part of its modernization, Gates is using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, allowing it to manage both VMs and containerized applications via the same platform.

Gates worked with Red Hat partner, Netlabs, to implement the new environment including storage and recovery capabilities. Netlabs assisted with a proof-of-concept exercise to validate that Gates’s VMs could run effectively on Red Hat OpenShift, and helped develop a bespoke migration tool before migrating more than 1,300 VMs to the new environment.

“We validated the platform on a proof of concept before moving a single production workload, then built the Hyper-V migration tooling together with Gates’ engineers. At this scale, that discipline is what protects the business,” said Pablo Casal, CEO, Netlabs.

Gates now has 5 Red Hat OpenShift clusters, spanning from the edge to the public cloud, and has modernized and transformed 67 enterprise applications from VMs into containers.

Supporting cultural change with in-depth training

The move from a traditional IT environment to a unified platform for VMs and containers was a major transformation for Gates’s IT teams, affecting multiple parts of the organization including application, infrastructure, and cybersecurity teams. As well as benefiting from knowledge sharing from Netlabs,the company used Red Hat Learning Subscription to help its teams build the skills and confidence needed to embrace the new platform.

“Training has been a fundamental piece of the whole puzzle,” said Silva. “We wanted to make sure that our people feel comfortable running the new platform, and the training from Red Hat has been great in getting us up to speed.”

In particular, Gates’s IT teams made full use of the ability to spin up and test infrastructure in hands-onlabs for practical experience, allowing them to explore the new concepts as they learned them.

Becoming more efficient, more collaborative, and AI-ready

Increased efficiency and grew compute capacity by 50%

With Red Hat OpenShift’s automated workflows and the ability to manage containers and VMs through a single, unified platform, Gates has significantly increased the efficiency of managing its environment. It has also freed up 50% of compute capacity, which is now used to run AI and other applications.

“At a time when the cost of memory is a concern, we are now in a strong position with more capacity to support innovation and help the business move forward without additional investment,” said Silva.

Established a scalable foundation for AI at the edge

One of the key capabilities of the new standardized environment is the ability to support AI at the edge. For example, Gates uses AI-powered systems to check the quality of its products. These systems take pictures at high speed, then use AI to analyze and detect defects with greater accuracy than a human.“ With Red Hat OpenShift, we can process AI data locally and scale easily to roll out AI capabilities to allour operations around the world,” said Silva.

Strengthened collaboration across more than 100 global operations

Moving to a unified platform has not only modernized Gates’s infrastructure, but also transformed the way its teams work together. With changes at the infrastructure layer directly affecting applications and cybersecurity, the project has broken down the traditional boundaries, bringing together global teams across more than 30 countries and 100 operations. “It is incredible to see the level of collaboration, not just across different teams, but across the world,” said Silva. “Every one of our operations is gettingnew technology, and it is great to see the level of innovation this creates in the organization.”

Built the skills needed to quickly respond to evolving business needs

With the Red Hat Learning Subscription, the team was able to continuously build new skills andstay ahead of technology changes. This ongoing investment in learning helped create a more agile, adaptable workforce that could quickly respond to evolving business needs and emerging technologies.

Leading the way in manufacturing for the next 100 years

By modernizing its application environments on Red Hat technologies, Gates has optimized workflows,freed capacity for innovation, and built the foundation for AI-powered manufacturing.

The company is now focusing its efforts on deploying AI at scale on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift AI with multiple AI use cases already in progress, spanning customer service,quality inspection, operational productivity, and IT automation. “Now that we have the foundations we need, we have the opportunity to change at the application layer and transform the business capabilities we can provide as an organization,” said Silva. “This will allow us to generate even morevalue from now on, helping us remain a leader in manufacturing for the next 100 years.”

About Gates Corporation

Gates Corporation is a leading manufacturer of application-specific fluid power and power transmission solutions. The company aims to push the boundaries of materials science to engineer products that continually exceed expectations. The company has more than 13,000 employees and 120 locations across 30 countries.