Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – February 4, 2025 — Red Hat, a globally recognized leader in open-source solutions, has announced a significant collaboration with neoleap, a prominent digital financial services company and a subsidiary of Alrajhi Bank, one of Saudi Arabia’s largest banks. This partnership aims to develop a cutting-edge platform that promises to accelerate the delivery of innovative digital solutions while enhancing security measures.
The Strategic Alliance
Amro Almunajjed, the Head of Applications at neoleap, described this collaboration as a critical juncture in their digital transformation efforts. Neoleap, based in Riyadh, is a fintech company that offers a range of digital solutions tailored to business needs. These solutions encompass everything from digital wallets to point-of-sale payment acceptance, restaurant solutions, payment gateways, and card issuing services. Neoleap’s mission is to empower businesses of all sizes to manage their finances conveniently, anytime and anywhere, with the ease of a fingertip.
Addressing Industry Challenges
In the highly competitive payments industry, staying ahead requires continuous improvement in time-to-market, service quality, and adherence to regulatory and security standards, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). Neoleap faced challenges with a monolithic development process, limited infrastructure availability, and team availability constraints. To overcome these hurdles, neoleap sought a modern application platform that could boost its business agility.
The Container Adoption Journey
Neoleap embarked on an immersive Container Adoption Journey, guided by Red Hat Consulting. This journey involved meticulous planning, design, and implementation of a new platform tailored to neoleap’s specific challenges and goals. The process began with a gap analysis of neoleap’s existing DevOps processes, followed by the construction and ongoing monitoring and optimization of new processes. Applications are being modernized and migrated onto Red Hat OpenShift, a leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes. Initial use cases include Payment Wallet and Unified Merchant Portal applications.
Leveraging Red Hat Technologies
By combining the capabilities of Red Hat AMQ and Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, which includes Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, and Red Hat Quay, along with modern Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) processes, neoleap has streamlined its software development process. This transformation has reduced application deployment time from days to mere minutes, enabling neoleap to deliver its services more swiftly to its target market.
Future Prospects and Automation
Looking ahead, neoleap aims to further enhance its technology operations through increased automation. The company is considering the adoption of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as a cornerstone of its enterprise-wide automation strategy. Additionally, neoleap plans to expand its DevSecOps practices across the organization and develop a robust failover mechanism to fortify its disaster recovery strategy, all with the support of Red Hat.
Supporting Insights
Feras Al AlShaikh, Red Hat’s Regional Director for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Northern Gulf, and Levant, expressed excitement about supporting neoleap’s modernization journey. He noted that a platform-based approach is becoming the standard in the payments industry due to the flexibility offered by hybrid cloud infrastructure. Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud solutions are designed to enhance business agility, security, and scalability, which are essential for companies like neoleap to remain competitive. The collaboration with neoleap demonstrates how strategically applying modern technologies can lead to significant improvements in speed and efficiency. Red Hat takes pride in witnessing neoleap drive business value through its platform-based technology transformation.
Amro Almunajjed, Head of Applications at neoleap, emphasized the significance of the partnership with Red Hat in their digital transformation journey. He highlighted how Red Hat’s understanding of neoleap’s challenges and the potential of technology to deliver business impact has made the company more efficient and agile. The collaboration has significantly reduced deployment times, allowing neoleap to bring new and improved experiences to customers faster.
Understanding the Technical Jargon
For those unfamiliar with some of the technical terms mentioned, let’s break them down for easier understanding:
- Open Source Solutions: These are software solutions where the source code is made freely available for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. Open source promotes collaboration and transparency.
- Hybrid Cloud: This is a cloud computing environment that combines on-premises data centers (private clouds) with public cloud services, allowing data and applications to be shared between them. This setup offers more flexibility and deployment options.
- Kubernetes: An open-source platform used to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It helps in efficiently managing complex applications.
- DevOps: A set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to shorten the development lifecycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.
- CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment): These are practices in software development where code changes are automatically tested and deployed to production, ensuring quick and reliable software delivery.
- DevSecOps: An extension of DevOps that integrates security practices into the DevOps process to ensure that software is developed with security in mind from the outset.
Conclusion
The collaboration between Red Hat and neoleap marks a significant milestone in the digital transformation landscape of Saudi Arabia’s financial services industry. By leveraging cutting-edge technologies and modernizing its infrastructure, neoleap is poised to deliver innovative solutions with enhanced security and efficiency. This partnership not only strengthens neoleap’s position in the market but also exemplifies the value of strategic technology adoption in driving business success. As neoleap continues to evolve, it sets a benchmark for other companies in the region aiming to navigate the complexities of digital transformation.
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