SUSE helps Aussie Broadband simplify infrastructure, unify workloads and boost operational efficiency by up to 30% as it scales its ISP services nationwide.
Aussie Broadband has built a modern, cloud-native private cloud platform using SUSE Rancher Prime, SUSE Virtualization and a number of other SUSE technologies – achieving 20–30% improvements in operational efficiency.
Founded in a regional Victorian living room in 2003, Aussie Broadband has grown into a publicly listed company with over 780,000 broadband connections, a team of more than 1,300 staff, and was recently named Australia’s Most Trusted Telco by the Australian research company Roy Morgan.
Now the fifth-largest retail internet provider in Australia, its rapid expansion, through both organic growth and acquisitions, resulted in a fragmented tech stack.
To stay competitive and maintain service reliability, Aussie Broadband launched a major IT transformation, with a goal to create a unified, scalable cloud hosting platform.
“As a telco, we’re classified as an essential service, so any downtime within that ISP network is a big deal,” said Ben O’Shea, General Manager Transformation & Cloud, Aussie Broadband.
“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.”
With a VMware (by Broadcom) renewal looming, the team also saw an opportunity to retire more costly proprietary solutions in favour of open source. After evaluating options from Red Hat, VMware and Canonical, Aussie Broadband chose SUSE for its “powerful” combination of performance, flexibility, and support.
“We did a stringent evaluation,” said O’Shea.
“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.”
Using SUSE Rancher Prime as the control plane, and building on RKE2, SUSE Virtualisation, SUSE Linux Micro and SUSE Security, Aussie Broadband consolidated virtual machines and containerised workloads onto a single, unified platform. The company now manages its technology assets with a single-pane-of-glass interface – improving visibility and performance across its operations.
“Delivering new virtual machines or new container instances can take anywhere from one to two days,” said O’Shea.
“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.”
The infrastructure savings have been just as significant. By retiring VMware and streamlining its data center footprint, Aussie Broadband has achieved meaningful cost reductions across hardware, power, and software licensing.
“At the end of the day, SUSE has helped us achieve 20-to-30 per cent efficiency on our day-to-day operations,” said O’Shea.
To support the transformation, Aussie Broadband also adopted SUSE Consulting Services and SUSE Platinum eLearning to ensure enterprise-level support and expert guidance throughout the transformation process.
For the company’s 650,000 residential broadband users, the benefits are already being felt.
Applications that support customer connections are now more reliable, resilient and efficient.
“It directly impacts those end customers and translates into a more positive customer experience,” said O’Shea.
Looking ahead, Aussie Broadband is continuing to expand its Kubernetes footprint, with deployments planned across more than ten facilities in five states.
The company is also exploring SUSE Telco Edge solutions to support strategic edge deployments, enhancing critical ISP workloads and AI capabilities with the SUSE AI platform to drive further innovation.
“This is exactly the kind of transformation we love to support,” said Ben Henshall, General Manager, Australia & New Zealand, SUSE.
“Simple, scalable and built for growth, Aussie Broadband is showing how open source can power smarter telco operations.
What day-to-day difference has adoption of the SUSE platform made to Aussie Broadband?
Ben O’Shea: “It’s streamlined our technology operations, enabling faster, more reliable and easier platform upgrades, which in turn minimises our risk exposure. Our engineering and development teams can now access the latest virtualisation and containerisation technologies, and everything can be deployed in hours compared to days previously. Through automation and the adoption of gitops style operations practices, we’ve been able to improve realise significant benefits in terms of operational efficiencies and increased reliability.
And along with the risk reduction benefits I already mentioned, having a vendor validated and supported platform also mitigates the risk of using open-source software. We have confidence in the origin and lineage of the code powering our platform, and we’re working with a vendor who understands what Aussie Broadband does and the criticality of the services that we provide. So when we run into issues that we can’t solve in-house, we know we’re working with a partner that has our back.
How does the adoption of the SUSE platform widen the scope of Aussie Broadband’s ambitions for future initiative and expansion?
Ben O’Shea: “The SUSE platform is a foundational element for multiple parts of our Technology Strategy. It provides the common cloud hosting platform which will host all our workloads and applications. It’ll also be the foundation for our OSS and BSS re-platforming strategic initiatives, which will form the basis for our next phase of growth in our technology and business operations.
Technically, we’ll also be moving up the stake from IaaS and CaaS to other platform services that can help reduce time to market for our future product and technology projects, including API Gateway aaS, Database aaS and so on.”
