Content: Enterprises rely on trusted managed services partners to look after the health of their most vital systems and applications. Automation is a key component of delivering secure, reliable support to keep business applications running at their peak. No one knows this better than the technology experts at Ensono—a leading technology advisor, managed service provider, and trusted transformation partner who operate mission critical IBM and distributed IT, and hyperscale environments for some of the world’s largest brands.

For over a decade, Ensono built custom open-source Ansible automation configurations unique to each client’s environment. As the team at Ensono took on management of increasingly large client environments, they encountered levels of interdependence between systems that required new solutions to maintain exceptional service and performance. Without an automation platform to manage these crucial systems consistently, the team risked configuration drift, troubleshooting difficulties and increased infrastructure costs. They engaged IBM, their most strategic technology partner, to collaborate on a transformation.

Ensono partnered with IBM® and Red Hat® to streamline its automation platform and position the company to continue its accelerated growth. The foundational partnership between IBM and Red Hat gave the team at Ensono confidence in their expertise in automation and cloud-native technologies, critical components as they sought to unify automation processes, content, and analytics.

Ensono's Ansible and Integration team worked alongside IBM and Red Hat consultants to design and implement a hybrid technology solution. The teams migrated Ensono’s automation environment from Ansible Web eXecutable (AWX) onto IBM technologies, including Red Hat OpenShift® (link resides outside of ibm.com), Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform (link resides outside of ibm.com), and IBM watsonx™ Code Assistant™ for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed. Ansible Content Collections patterns were also used to ensure quality and consistency of automations through repeatable templates. The team also implemented analytics for greater insight into automation performance, allowing for the identification of patterns and issues that had previously required manual intervention.

During implementation, Ensono integrated a centralized hub for its automation content and best practices. This facilitated the cleansing of AWX data and provided the ability to perform direct database migrations. These elements became the foundation of a unified enterprise automation platform. By leveraging the Red Hat concept of a community of practice, Ensono has improved knowledge sharing amongst the team and greatly increased efficiency by creating shared best practices.

Since successfully streamlining its automation environment, Ensono has simplified integrations, reduced infrastructure sprawl, accelerated release cycles, and improved consistency across their platform. The time savings from improved scalability and efficiency has enabled Ensono’s support teams to shift focus from managing automation software to creating new automations and value for its clients.

After just one year, company has been able to complete 28 million tasks and run over 158,000 jobs with the new solution—optimizing automated infrastructure deployments and improving client incident response and resolution. This directly translates into high application availability and improved application performance for Ensono’s clients. Developers at Ensono have also saved an estimated 100,000+ hours thanks to the newly consolidated automation environment.

In the next phase of its automation journey, the company plans to use IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed to customize models, standardize interactions between upstream and downstream systems, and build out a developer backlog.

With the success of its automation platform transformation, and the changes to come, Ensono continues to provide exceptional client experiences as a leader in automation and innovation.

Ensono (link resides outside of ibm.com) is an expert technology advisor and managed service provider located in the United States. Since its founding in 2016, the company has grown into a leading IT service provider with multiple data and delivery centers in the U.K., Germany, Poland, India, and Singapore. Ensono currently serves over 300 clients, including Fortune 50 companies, and has a strong expertise in cloud-native applications, mainframe modernization, and AI-powered automation.