Tietoevry Care, the healthcare services division of the global IT software and service company Tietoevry, works to modernize the Nordic health and social care sector. The company provides innovative software solutions — including AI copilots, data analytics and resource planning platforms — to enhance experiences for both patients and healthcare professionals, while helping care facilities operate more efficiently and cost-effectively.
At-a-Glance
To accelerate innovation in developing and delivering health and social care services, Tietoevry Care embraced containerization with SUSE Rancher Prime. The secure, highly available container management platform empowers the organization’s lean development team to efficiently deliver high-quality, SaaS-based healthcare applications to end customers.
The journey to enterprise open source support
Historically, parts of the health and social care sector have lagged behind in digitalization. Tietoevry Care aims to change this by driving the adoption of data-driven care solutions. Initially, the company developed its innovative services on virtualized infrastructure running in a private cloud. As containerization technology matured, the organization saw a valuable opportunity to cut time to market by enabling more agile and cost-effective development.
As the first step on its journey to containers, Tietoevry Care began developing a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution to help its application teams deliver software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to customers. The company’s PaaS team chose the community edition of Rancher to manage Kubernetes clusters securely, ensuring robust protection for sensitive healthcare data.
While the initial deployment proved successful, as more application owners in Tietoevry Care moved to containers, the company’s lean team was under increasing pressure to maintain the platform.
The organization also planned to extend its internal PaaS platform, internally known as Carekube (C³), to external customers in the future. Once launched externally, the platform would empower healthcare organizations to accelerate digital transformation by developing and integrating their own containerized applications.
To effectively support C³’s growing internal adoption and its anticipated external launch, Tietoevry Care aimed to reduce the burden on its team by adopting enterprise-grade support for its open source container management solution.
“We chose to transition from the community edition of Rancher to SUSE Rancher Prime. As you grow, you need to deliver a more professional product. SUSE Rancher Prime helps us do this through enterprise-grade, 24/7 support and robust lifecycle management, including regular maintenance updates, predictable release cycles and long-term support.”
Why SUSE Rancher Prime?
After a thorough review of the market, Tietoevry Care decided to build on its success with SUSE.
“We chose to transition from the community edition of Rancher to SUSE Rancher Prime,” says Patric Grandin, Product Manager at Tietoevry Care. “As you grow, you need to deliver a more professional product. SUSE Rancher Prime helps us do this through enterprise-grade, 24/7 support and robust lifecycle management, including regular maintenance updates, predictable release cycles and long-term support.”
These enterprise-level capabilities were essential for Tietoevry Care, given the critical nature of healthcare solutions and the increased operational responsibility on its lean PaaS team. SUSE Rancher Prime empowered the organization to confidently manage a rapidly growing container environment, ensuring reliability, stability and security without increasing headcount or operational complexity.
With SUSE Rancher Prime, Tietoevry Care maintains lean operational costs while partnering with a provider that aligns with its commitment to open source technology.
Grandin explains: “What we liked best about SUSE is that their products are still open source. You don’t get boxed in as with some other vendors. We can use whichever other solutions we like alongside SUSE Rancher Prime.”
Why SUSE Consulting?
Alongside SUSE Rancher Prime, Tietoevry Care engaged SUSE Consulting to support the deployment and accelerate the adoption of the platform. The additional expertise helped the internal team move faster, validate architectural decisions and ensure the PaaS environment was optimized from the start.
“Our team are experts in Kubernetes, but it is a small team,” notes Grandin. “We greatly appreciate being able to bounce ideas off the SUSE team, share best practices and get ideas about new ways of working.”
SUSE Consulting didn’t just provide technical guidance, it expanded the team’s capacity, shortened time to value and helped align the platform rollout with Tietoevry’s broader strategic goals. By integrating deeply with internal workflows, SUSE consultants helped de-risk the deployment and unlock long-term agility.
The impact of SUSE Rancher Prime
Empowers growth without increasing headcount
Since deploying SUSE Rancher Prime, the PaaS team at Tietoevry Care has been expanding containerization across the organization. Today, 10 high-quality SaaS-based digital healthcare products are securely hosted and delivered via the highly available C³ platform supported by SUSE Rancher Prime. The transition to enterprise support has proven essential: it enables growth through operational efficiency for Tietoevry Care to securely scale its platform to meet growing customer demands.
“Working in a strictly regulated industry and handling sensitive patient data, security was essential to us. SUSE Rancher Prime allows us to create a more agile platform without compromising on the security of our private cloud environment,” notes Grandin.
Accelerated launch of cutting-edge openEHR platform, Lifecare Open Platform
With SUSE Rancher Prime at the heart of C³, application development teams at Tietoevry Care have gained newfound agility, empowering them to accelerate the delivery of new products while meeting customer expectations for reliability, including 24/7 uptime (99.5%).
One standout example is the Lifecare Open Platform, a secure, open framework for managing and sharing electronic health record (EHR) data. Delivering the platform as SaaS instead of an on-premises deployment made development significantly faster and easier for the DevOps team, enabling rapid updates and issue resolutions without requiring customer IT involvement.
“Our Lifecare Open Platform product is the first of its kind,” says Grandin. “openEHR has been on the table for many years within healthcare, but we are now leading the way in turning the concept into a reality.”
Karolinska University Hospital, the second-largest hospital in Sweden, has already used the Lifecare Open Platform to successfully unify patient data from siloed systems, enabling clinicians to assess patient cases faster and make informed cancer treatment decisions.
Drives productivity and cost efficiency
As more product teams at Tietoevry Care standardize on C³, the company is seeing significant productivity improvements and reduced operational costs compared to its previous private cloud setup.
“With SUSE Rancher Prime powering our C³ platform, our product owners enjoy a single pane of glass for IT management and can deploy new releases faster and more securely to their end users,” explains Grandin. “At the same time, my small team can easily manage ten products and growing — from integration software to a mobile self-check-in application.”
The impact of SUSE Consulting
With support from SUSE Consulting, Tietoevry Care is making the most of SUSE Rancher Prime’s capabilities, ensuring maximum return on investment.
“SUSE has the competence and the willingness to help, no matter how big or small the issue,” notes Grandin. “Their consultant provided guidance and expertise exactly when we needed it, helping our lean team quickly overcome challenges and identify opportunities for improvement.”
With SUSE Consulting, Tietoevry Care has flexible access to a subject matter expert. As the PaaS team deepened its expertise with SUSE Rancher Prime and better understood customer requirements, its SUSE consultant was consistently available to discuss new ideas and answer questions.
“My engineer just booked time whenever he wanted it,” says Grandin. “The SUSE consultant was incredibly agile in his response to our needs.”
What’s next for Tietoevry Care?
Looking ahead, Tietoevry Care will build upon its success with SUSE by deploying additional solutions such as SUSE Security and SUSE Storage to further optimize its C³ platform. The organization also plans to leverage RKE2 and K3s to enhance flexibility and portability for containerized workloads.
“We are now preparing to offer our PaaS solution to external customers, opening the benefits of containerization to healthcare institutions and researchers,” concludes Grandin. “We look forward to continuing working with SUSE to support a new data-driven care approach across the Nordics.”