Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open-source solutions, has announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2023 for the Australia and New Zealand region. Red Hat is honoring the remarkable achievements of ANZ Bank Australia, ING Australia, and Southern Cross Health Society, for their outstanding efforts to foster innovation, showcase ingenuity, and elevate customer experiences using Red Hat’s open-source solutions.

In an environment of economic fluctuations and technological upheavals, Red Hat continues with the theme “Explore what’s next” for this year’s Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards. This year’s accolades celebrate the exceptional accomplishments of organizations in adapting to today’s uncertain landscape, proudly recognizing the digital transformation achievements of 31 organizations from 13 countries in the region. By harnessing the power of open source creatively, these remarkable organizations propel themselves forward while prioritizing unforgettable customer experiences. Their unwavering resilience, strategic thinking, and ingenious utilization of Red Hat solutions have allowed them to conquer new business challenges and stay one step ahead of evolving customer demands.

Amid growing uncertainty, innovation still stands tall as a priority for businesses. According to the Red Hat 2023 Global Tech Outlook, businesses continue to rank innovation as a powerful differentiator, allowing organizations to rise above their competitors and forge a unique path to success. The awards’ five categories focus on key technology areas: Digital Transformation, Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud-native Development, Automation, and Resilience.

The Digital Transformation category recognizes organizations that have successfully made the transition into a truly digital enterprise, overcoming and addressing business challenges with digitalization.

The Automation category celebrates organizations that have effectively harnessed automation to transform their organizational processes, workflows, and tasks.

The Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure category showcases organizations that have demonstrated creative and collaborative use of public, private, and open cloud deployments.

The Cloud-Native Development category highlights organizations that have effectively used agile methodologies to speed up the innovation and development of successful business applications that have made an impact on customers.

The winners were selected based on the positive impact their Red Hat deployments had on their business goals. They showcase the possibilities of open source, pushing the boundaries of business processes, productivity, innovation, and resilience.  

Category: Digital Transformation and Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Winner: Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (Australia)

Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited is one of the four largest banks in Australia, and the number one bank in New Zealand, serving over 8.5 million retail and business customers, operating in more than 30 markets, including Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Region, Asia, UK, Europe and North America.

As ANZ Bank set out to improve the financial well-being and sustainability of customers through its portfolio of services, tools and insights, it recognized very early on the importance of investing in digital to modernize workloads and differentiate itself from competitors. With their current implementation of Red Hat OpenShift 3.11 approaching the end of life, the bank worked with their account team and Red Hat Consulting to develop a roadmap that would enable them to migrate their existing applications to Red Hat OpenShift 4, while minimizing risk and avoiding any major disruption.

To do this, ANZ Bank used Red Hat Service Interconnect, a solution that enables agile, portable and secure communication across environments. The solution helped the bank to more securely connect applications across environments, enabling developer teams to move them as they were ready, without needing elevated privileges or dependencies on network operations. This resulted in a streamlined migration and improved developer experience, as well as maintaining uninterrupted transactions for the bank’s retail and commercial customers. Digitalizing these workflows has reduced the amount of engineering resources required to complete the project.

Category: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Automation

Winner: ING Bank (Australia) Limited

ING changed the way Australians bank more than 22 years ago by launching the country’s first branchless bank. ING now offers Australians home loans, transactional banking, superannuation, credit cards, personal lending, insurance and wholesale banking services. Today, ING is Australia’s most recommended bank^[1] and fifth largest main financial institution^[2]. It’s also Canstar’s Bank of the Year and has been since 2020.

As a longtime Red Hat customer, ING has used Red Hat solutions to improve automation, drive efficiency and accelerate cloud adoption. Working with Red Hat has allowed ING to accelerate the adoption of a microservices-based architecture. ING’s technology department was further faced with the task of integration and operations of traditional and modern cloud-based workloads across the bank’s existing ecosystems. Leveraging Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has supported ING in uplifting its capability, which will assist the bank in the adoption of a more efficient hybrid cloud operating environment to drive innovation and address complexity.

Category: Digital Transformation and Cloud-Native Development

Winner: Southern Cross Health Society

Southern Cross Health Society opened for business in 1961, introducing health insurance to New Zealanders and establishing itself as one of New Zealand’s most trusted brands. Southern Cross was established because its founders believed New Zealanders should have ongoing access to private healthcare options. Over the years, Southern Cross has expanded its community of care and now helps more New Zealanders than ever to look after their health and wellbeing, travel plans and pets.

One of the organization’s main objectives was to move away from manual processes and monolithic platforms to provide customers with a better digital experience through online services and mobile applications. They also provide services to their healthcare partners, so centralized integration capabilities are crucial for this purpose.

To enable this, Southern Cross used a managed service for Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO), unlocking access to a modern, microservices platform that enables essential services such as API management and streaming. The fully managed service gave Southern Cross the flexibility and scalability to grow with demand, without having to pump in extra investments or manpower to manage the platform. ARO has also provided huge cost savings for Southern Cross, boosting productivity and reducing the time to market. This has allowed healthcare partners and insurance clients a much-improved experience in handling their insurance policies, as most of these processes are now automated.

Supporting Quotes

Marjet Andriesse, senior vice president and general manager, APJC, Red Hat
“As the business landscape continues to change in 2023, the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2023 celebrates the creative successes and achievements of our customers. Organizations today are increasingly turning to capabilities like data analytics to embark on transformation initiatives and cloud security to protect their businesses. Furthermore, they have to manage all these while addressing tightening resources and manpower. That is why open source continues to be a game-changer for businesses, giving them the flexibility and resilience to adopt technologies, both existing and emerging, to craft their own unique path to success.”

Peter Tsatsaronis, product area lead, wholesale digital, ANZ Bank
“Shifting IT architectures can be a very complex and lengthy process, especially when you take into consideration the costs and risks involved. Migrating our OpenShift applications presented similar challenges. The Red Hat team worked very closely with us to evolve and help bring Red Hat Service Interconnect to market and enable us to take advantage of the agility and scalability that it offers. This has allowed us to not only increase the productivity of our developers, but also retain a high level of customer satisfaction. With the success we’ve seen on the initiative, we can rightly say that our decision to go digital-first in investments has been the right one in these economic times.”

Linda Da Silva, chief information officer, ING Australia
“It’s an honour to receive this award from Red Hat. This recognition is a testament to ING’s incredibly diligent technology team, who are always focused on simplifying the technology environment and pursuing operational excellence, in order to continually enhance customer and employee experience. Thank you to Red Hat for assisting us in doing this.”

Sam Koo, head of platforms, Southern Cross Health Society
“As a healthcare provider, it is important to us to provide exceptional customer experience not only in the healthcare services we deliver but also in how they communicate with us. For us, delivering digital services is important to enable this. Migrating to the Azure Red Hat OpenShift has greatly revolutionized the way we work, ​​allowing us to innovate faster and add new features and services. This has helped fulfil our commitment to provide the best customer experience as well as offer centralized integration capabilities to our healthcare partners.”

Additional Resources

• Learn more about the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2023

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About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open-source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open-source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future. 

^[1] Australia’s most recommended bank according to RFI Global’s XPRT Survey, December 2022 – May 2023 (n = 31,860) when compared to customers of 20 other banks operating in Australia

Australia’s fifth largest main financial institution (MFI) with 6% of the market share, according to RFI

^[2] Global’s XPRT Survey, December 2022 – May 2023 (n = 31,860). MFI is defined as the bank that the consumer says is their main financial institution.