As a global leader in marine and infrastructure projects, Jan De Nul must deliver complex engineering solutions at speed. Its development teams sought greater autonomy to innovate, while IT needed to ensure that security, compliance, and consistency were never compromised.
Legacy practices and fragmented development environments had created inefficiencies, slowing the delivery of new digital services. The challenge was clear: how to empower developers with freedom and agility while preserving the control and reliability the business depends on?
Jan De Nul turned to Red Hat OpenShift as a foundation for cloud-native application development. In partnership with AE and Red Hat, they explored how to translate proven best practices into a scalable framework that could empower teams across the organisation.
Through the co-creation of Golden Paths — predefined workflows and templates — IT and development discovered a common language. These Golden Paths embed standards, security checks and CI/CD pipelines directly into the development journey, allowing teams to innovate faster while maintaining governance and control.
The solution
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Predefined workflows: ready-to-use templates and CI/CD pipelines
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Built-in compliance: security and governance checks by default
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Developer autonomy: teams focus on functionality, not configuration
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Scalable infrastructure: a platform that grows with global projects
This approach ensured that developers could work independently while IT kept full visibility and control.
The impact
By introducing Golden Paths on OpenShift, Jan De Nul achieved:
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Faster time-to-market for new applications
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Consistent standards across teams and projects
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Improved developer experience with fewer manual tasks
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Greater business agility, enabling digital initiatives to scale globally
Looking ahead
The journey is ongoing. Jan De Nul continues to refine its Golden Paths, broadening adoption across teams and integrating new practices as technology evolves. With OpenShift as the backbone, the organisation is well-positioned to accelerate innovation and stay ahead in a demanding industry.