Aussie Broadband sees 30% gains with SUSE open platform

Aussie Broadband has implemented a private cloud platform with SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Virtualisation, reporting operational efficiency gains of up to 30% while modernising its national service delivery.

The telecommunications provider, which now has over 780,000 broadband connections, has seen substantial growth since its founding in 2003. This expansion, both organic and through acquisitions, led to a fragmented technology stack that presented significant challenges to ongoing operations and reliability.

To address these issues, Aussie Broadband launched a project to unify its infrastructure and transition away from legacy proprietary systems. According to the company, VMware will be retired in favour of open-source solutions, with SUSE's unified platform chosen following a competitive evaluation of alternatives from Red Hat, VMware and Canonical.

As part of this transformation, Aussie Broadband adopted SUSE Rancher Prime as its primary control plane, leveraging RKE2, SUSE Virtualisation, SUSE Linux Micro, and SUSE Security to consolidate virtual machines and container workloads onto a single platform. The new system offers improved management visibility and operational performance, with a single-pane-of-glass solution for oversight and control.

Ben O'Shea, General Manager Transformation & Cloud at Aussie Broadband, described the significance of the project for ensuring high service availability. "As a telco, we're classified as an essential service, so any downtime within that ISP network is a big deal," said O'Shea. "We needed a platform that could keep our core ISP and customer services running reliably, while improving the efficiency of the systems our teams depend on."

O'Shea also detailed the company's evaluation process and the reasons for selecting SUSE. "We did a stringent evaluation. We looked at a number of open source and commercial vendors, and the customer references for SUSE and their support were exceptional, and that was a big part of the decision going forward."

With the new platform in place, provision times for virtual machines and container instances have been notably reduced. "Delivering new virtual machines or new container instances can take anywhere from one to two days," O'Shea said. "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."

Cost reductions have come in multiple areas, including hardware, power, and licensing, as the company consolidates its data centre footprint. O'Shea said, "At the end of the day, SUSE has helped us achieve 20-to-30 per cent efficiency on our day-to-day operations."

The transformation process was supported by the adoption of SUSE Consulting Services and SUSE Platinum eLearning, ensuring access to enterprise support and expertise throughout the rollout.

For its substantial residential customer base, now numbering around 650,000, these changes are delivering improvements in service reliability and efficiency. O'Shea commented, "It directly impacts those end customers and translates into a more positive customer experience."

Future plans for Aussie Broadband include expansion of its Kubernetes-based infrastructure across at least ten sites nationwide, as well as investigation into SUSE Telco Edge solutions for supporting strategic edge deployments and AI applications to further develop its offering.

Ben Henshall, General Manager, Australia & New Zealand at SUSE, commented on the collaboration: "This is exactly the kind of transformation we love to support. Simple, scalable, and built for growth, Aussie Broadband is showing how open source can power smarter telco operations."