The Italian telecom company uses OpenStack as the framework for its infrastructure-as-a-service public cloud.

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We’re spotlighting users and operators who are on the front lines deploying OpenStack in their organizations to drive business success. These users are taking risks, contributing back to the community and working to secure the success of their organization in today’s software-defined economy. We want to hear from you, too: get in touch with editorATopenstack.org to share your story.

Today, we’re talking to Fastweb,  an Italian telecommunications company that provides landline, broadband Internet and digital television services.  Fastweb provides cloud-based information and communications technology (ICT) services to Italian businesses without internal resources to independently develop and support them. As its user uptake grew, Fastweb needed to improve the automation and self-service capabilities according to the highly dynamic customer needs. Last year, they migrated to the Red Hat OpenStack Platform to meet those market needs.

Here we catch up with cloud engineer Amedeo Salvati.

Describe how are you using OpenStack. What kinds of applications or workloads are you currently running on OpenStack?

In Fastweb, we are using OpenStack as our framework for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud offer (fastcloud.it), so our customers can run anything that they need to on it.

What business results, at a high level, have you seen from using OpenStack? What have been the biggest benefits to your organization as a result of using OpenStack? How are you measuring the impact?

The biggest benefit we had using OpenStack, was the freedom to customize everything, also avoiding vendor lock-in.

What is a challenge that you’ve faced within your organization regarding OpenStack, and how did you overcome it?

A big challenge for us in the beginning was around building the right team who are able to manage engineering and operations of our OpenStack deployment, but after two years we have found the right combination of smart people to make it work.

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