ABB centralizes automation management for teams worldwide, simplifying compliance and reducing duplication while maintaining local autonomy
By : Bakinam Khaled
Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that ABB, the technology leader in electrification and automation, has deployed Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for its teams worldwide to simplify configuring systems, deploying applications, and orchestrating complex workflows across hybrid IT environments.
ABB’s new standardized approach has helped to save an average of 57 hours per month across 32 teams since January 2025. Automation has also simplified compliance, supported faster IT service delivery for end users, and contributed to reduced costs.
As a global organization operating in more than 100 countries, ABB is built on a decentralized model in which each business division has the autonomy to choose the solutions that best fit its local market. However, decades of engineering excellence and a deep legacy of innovation have resulted in a highly complex IT landscape which includes an interconnected mix of modern cloud platforms, on-premise systems, and longstanding industrial technologies.
Across this landscape, disparate teams were using different automation tools and frameworks, often with narrow scopes and in isolated instances. While these efforts delivered value, the fragmented approach led to duplication, higher operational effort, and inconsistent levels of security.
For its new centralized global automation platform, ABB selected Ansible Automation Platform with its broad community ecosystem, strong vendor support, and multitenancy capabilities. It was designed and implemented within less than a year for teams across all ABB business divisions.
ABB’s Group Information Systems (IS) team manages Ansible Automation Platform centrally, while the solution’s multitenant capabilities allow each business division, internal IT team, and external service provider to operate independently, reusing shared automations through a central repository while maintaining autonomy. Ansible Automation Platform now supports more than 75 live use cases, with more than 150 additional use cases in development, backed by an infrastructure that has doubled in size since launch.
Simplified system compliance and increased resilience
Teams across ABB have already reported faster delivery, greater efficiency, and measurable cost reductions via the company’s quarterly Automation Business Value Surveys. One team alone identified CH 80’000 of cost avoidance savings over 3 years from a single use case. Automation has also unlocked major efficiency gains in core business systems. For example, the SAP team in China cut monthly patching time for over 100 servers from 6.5 hours to just 20 minutes per server, reducing effort and maintenance windows. To help increase resilience and reduce manual effort, ABB has automated disaster recovery workflows, including failover and testing.
ABB has automated several service desk workflows by integrating Ansible Automation Platform with ServiceNow, with 4,000 tickets handled automatically to reduce processing time by nearly 40,000 hours. For example, Active Directory password restores are now fully automated, giving employees faster resolutions without waiting for manual ticket handling. ABB has automated disaster recovery workflows, including failover and testing, helping to increase resilience. Configuration settings have also been automated to standardize and simplify compliance: some systems have up to 400 configuration items, from encryption to file sharing, which were time-consuming to manage using manual processes.
The cultural shift toward automation-first thinking is supporting continuous improvement at ABB, with teams encouraged to question existing processes, share knowledge, and investigate opportunities for innovation. Building on its success with Ansible Automation Platform, ABB is now evaluating Red Hat OpenShift to support a more centralized, scalable approach to application modernization.
Supporting Quotes
Richard Zobrist, country manager Switzerland, Red Hat
“The implementation of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as the central automation platform at ABB demonstrates that even highly complex organizations with globally distributed and fragmented IT infrastructures can consolidate their existing automation processes across all teams and platforms. ABB has already achieved impressive efficiency gains and cost savings with enterprise-wide automation and is well positioned to unlock further potential in the future.”
Grzegorz Tomczak, Global IS Service Owner for Fundamental Infrastructure & Automation, ABB
“With Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as the foundation, ABB can scale automation more efficiently. Our 32 teams that use automation report an average of 57 hours saved per month, allowing them to focus on higher-value work. With Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform in place, we can embed resilience by design, reduce the risk of human error, and allow reuse to simplify the provisioning of services across the enterprise.”
