SINGAPORE – October 21, 2020 – Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for Singapore. GIC and Standard Chartered Bank were honored at the Red Hat Forum Asia Pacific 2020 today for their exceptional and innovative use of Red Hat solutions.
In response to the recent global events that are causing consumer shifts, many organizations are accelerating their digital transformation efforts to adapt. In a November 2019 study sponsored by Red Hat, 95% of APAC executives surveyed said digital transformation has gained importance[1] and perceived it as a strategy for both survival and growth in the new normal. This has increased the need to use innovative technologies to create new business models, products or services.
Since there is no one-size-fits-all blueprint for digital transformation, this year’s Red Hat Forum Asia Pacific aims to inspire organizations to unleash the power of open source technologies to achieve their short-term goals and future-proof their business for the next normal. To support that, the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 recognize the technological achievements of organizations that demonstrate creative thinking, determined problem solving and creative use of Red Hat solutions to make a difference in their business, industry or society.
The winners were selected based on the impact of their Red Hat deployments on their business goals, industry and communities, as well as the uniqueness of vision for the project. They displayed how open source platforms and culture have helped them improve productivity, agility and cost savings, while empowering them to address future challenges and emerging trends more confidently and effectively. This year’s awards honored 27 APAC organizations across five categories: digital transformation, hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud-native development, automation and resilience. This year’s winners for Singapore include:
Categories: Digital Transformation and Cloud-Native Development
Winner: GIC Private Limited (GIC)
GIC is a leading global investment firm established in 1981 to manage Singapore’s foreign reserves. A disciplined long-term value investor, GIC is uniquely positioned for investments across a wide range of asset classes, including equities, fixed income, private equity, real estate and infrastructure. Headquartered in Singapore, GIC employs more than 1,700 people across 10 offices in key financial cities worldwide.
The Technology Group in GIC leads innovation and transformation within the organization, and develops holistic solutions to enhance GIC’s investment decisions and operations.
As part of a digital transformation roadmap, the Technology Group embarked on an effort to use container-based technology, to develop and deploy applications and business solutions in amoreefficient, more secure and scalable way. Through the development of applications grounded in a container platform and microservices architecture, cloud-native first was identified as an integral capability for this project.
GIC deployed Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated as its fully-managed enterprise grade container platform on AWS to host some of its critical IT solutions, complemented by other solutions, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As a result, GIC was able to create a robust and scalable infrastructure with predefined service-level agreement (SLA), reduce its total cost of operations over the long term, develop more efficient processes and enhanced security.
Category: Digital Transformation and Cloud-Native Development
Winner: Standard Chartered Bank
Standard Chartered is a multinational banking and financial services company. It operates in 60 markets and employs around 86,000 people.
The bank needed to transform and disrupt emerging markets by ramping up its digital capabilities for its online and mobile banking channels. It also aimed to provide better customer satisfaction in regions with increasing digital penetration like GCNA (Greater China & North Asia), ASA (ASEAN & South Asia) and AME (Africa & Middle East). To achieve these goals, it adopted Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat JBoss Web Server and Red Hat Fuse to increase productivity and develop and deploy applications faster.
The bank’s RPBWM (Retail, Private Banking & Wealth Management) Digital Channels team, supported by Red Hat Consulting, was able to utilize Red Hat OpenShift to accelerate the revamp of the legacy channel applications (internet banking and mobile banking) into a microservices driven, cloud-native solution.
By adopting Red Hat OpenShift, the bank saw a reduction in infrastructure cost, the ability to scale up and support a several-fold increase in traffic, reduced time to deploy and go-to-market for applications, and a greatly simplified production rollout and recovery process.
The platform also played a critical role in the rapid roll-out of digital banking capabilities for several countries in the AME region by improving overall time-to-market and reduced total cost of ownership.
The Digital Transformation category recognizes organizations that have successfully addressed IT challenges and delivered business value to effectively compete as a digital enterprise. The Cloud-Native Development category showcases agile methodologies and organizations that have most successfully illustrate superior overall performance in creating, maintaining and deploying successful business applications.
[1] Harvard Business Review Analytic Services Briefing Paper for Red Hat, “Understanding APAC’s Success in Digital Transformation”, July 2020 https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/APAC-digital-transformation-HBR-analyst-report
