BBVA Signs Strategic Collaboration with Red Hat to Accelerate the Group's Global Transformation

DUBAI, UAE, 2nd June, 2016 - BBVA announced a global strategic collaboration with global provider of enterprise open source solutions Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) aimed at helping accelerate BBVA's global transformation and technology-driven innovation processes. The agreement, which turns Red Hat into a priority partner for BBVA, is part of a series of alliances that BBVA is aiming to forge with strategic partners. Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst and BBVA Head of Engineering Ricardo Moreno signed the strategic collaboration during a ceremony in Madrid.

The partnership is designed to focus on business and technical alignment to support BBVA to accelerate innovation, manage the growth of financial transactions on digital devices and deliver digital banking services to its global customers.

“We are facing a new scenario that requires keeping the customer at the center of everything we do, and technology is one of the key levers to tackle this transformation process,” said BBVA Head of Engineering Ricardo Moreno. “This collaboration agreement with Red Hat will help us to capitalize on the opportunities offered by cloud computing technologies, in order to continue making strides in our process of becoming a more flexible and scalable digital bank.”

The new IaaS and PaaS-based platform by Red Hat will enable BBVA to focus on developing applications that can support the heavy demands of global digital bank services and provide customers with the service and information they want and when it is needed.

According to Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO, Red Hat, “BBVA is a fantastic example of a global enterprise that has turned to an open source-based cloud to drive business innovation through technology. We are thrilled to collaborate with them on this journey to transform their business and to help them reach their goal of becoming the world’s first digital global bank. With a modern and flexible IaaS and PaaS-based platform, BBVA will be well-poised to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the fast-evolving digital economy and help meet growing customer expectations in these areas.”

The agreement between BBVA and Red Hat will help streamline collaboration spanning several key areas, including:

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS):  BBVA has designed an automated, multi-tenant service cloud based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, a highly scalable, production-ready solution that offers an open foundation for cloud deployments. This infrastructure can help BBVA deliver better, more efficient services to its clients globally.

Platform-as-a-Service: BBVA and Red Hat are collaborating to define and build BBVA's global corporate PaaS architecture based on Red Hat’s OpenShift container application platform. This PaaS-based architecture can help BBVA to transform the process to deliver solutions, facilitating the development and the automated deployment of new solutions.

Cloud management platform: BBVA’s cloud management platform, based on RedHat CloudForms, will facilitate the operating and financial management of a multi-cloud environment.

BBVA and Red Hat plan to work together on training and enablement initiatives designed to help BBVA manage its transformation and adopt new technologies, enable knowledge transfer and offer support.