Transforming the world: Announcing our Red Hat Digital Leaders 2022

The transformative power of open source technology underpins all we strive for at Red Hat. It is also the driving force behind the Red Hat Digital Leaders Awards. Designed to celebrate our customers’ success, the awards aim to shine a spotlight on their unique innovations and focus on the business value and impact of digital transformation projects. 

For the second year running, the awards are brought to us with the support of technology analyst firm IDC and are sponsored by Intel. The awards aim to capture and showcase unique applications of technology, while sharing best practices fueling the next wave of digital innovation and success. We received entries from across the region from a wide range of industries that demonstrate the scale and capabilities of open source technologies.

“This year’s entries were stronger than ever, making it really challenging to choose only one winner. The winners in each category were able to demonstrate the challenges the business faced, the strong open source solutions they implemented and, most importantly, the positive impact that each organization has made for its IT teams and end users”

• Jordan Rodgers, EMEA Enterprise Sales Director, Intel Corporation

The winners were recognized in three main categories:  App Dev, Automation and Infrastructure, with special awards for Cultural Change and Speed of Innovation. 

Category: App Dev

Winner: JCCM

Junta de Castilla La Mancha (JCCM) is the institution that organizes the self-government of the Spanish autonomous community of Castilla-La Mancha, one of the largest regions in Spain with a population of approximately two million inhabitants spread over 919 municipalities. This geographical dispersion has made it necessary for the government to establish as a key objective the approach of the administration to its citizens through the implementation of digital communications. To do this, it decided to adopt an agile and efficient hybrid cloud infrastructure based on microservices.

Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies have enabled JCCM to automate its entire development process, unit tests, integration, acceptance tests and move to production. By adopting a more agile, self-service strategy, everyone and all the necessary tools are in one place. JCCM’s developers have new tools and resources at their disposal in projects from start to finish. If something isn't working or performing as it should, they can fix it and get the system back up and running in no time.

By implementing a centralised end-to-end automation ecosystem for the development and operation of corporate services built on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Manager, and with help from Red Hat Consulting, JCCM has reduced development and delivery times for new and more personalised digital services.

Category: Automation

Winner: DATEV EG

Headquartered in Nuremberg, Germany, DATEV eG is a cooperative society that specialises in offering technical services, software and consulting to accountants, lawyers and tax professionals. DATEV eG’s entire business is built on leveraging technology to solve accounting problems. However, software development at the firm was being held back by a lack of automation.

Numerous development teams had their own automation framework and scripts and there were no sharing or self-service options. The challenge was to establish an automation platform for all the different teams, where they could build their own services with the ability to share those with other infrastructure and developer teams.

Working with Red Hat Consulting, DATEV eG implemented Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. The platform has introduced much greater levels of self-service at DATEV eG from individual development and operation teams to agile DevOps teams. This has resulted in faster configuration and installation in the department teams and led to fewer human errors. The project has enabled DATEV eG to break down silos between teams and departments, and created more opportunities for collaboration.

Category: Infrastructure

Winner: Minsait

Operating globally, Minsait specialises in the delivery of digital transformation solutions across a broad range of industries. In 2022, Minsait teamed up with Red Hat to launch an open and scalable edge computing solution (Onesait Phygital Edge) with advanced security capabilities geared towards the virtualization of electrical substations.

Minsait’s new edge computing architecture, built using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Edge Computing and Red Hat OpenShift in a single node, with an integrated Ansible-based tool, permits the complete and interoperable virtualization of devices and applications deployed at electricity substations. It enables remote management, flexible local scaling, resilience to failures and the capacity to deploy new applications.

Thanks to the combination of open hybrid cloud technology with real-time monitoring and edge capabilities, this helps identify risks in electricity supply. Minsait estimates a reduction of around 55% time-to-market in the implementation of new services to adapt to the needs of energy consumption or production of clients. Savings of 47% are also expected in the management and maintenance costs of the secondary substations, and will enable the architecture of current secondary substations to be simplified, integrating digital devices into their structure.

Special winners

Category: Cultural change

Winner: MarketAxess

International financial technology company MarketAxess operates a leading electronic trading platform that delivers greater trading efficiency, a diversified pool of liquidity and significant cost savings to institutional investors and broker-dealers across the global fixed-income markets. Founded in 2000, the S&P 500 fintech enables over 1,900 firms around the world to efficiently trade corporate bonds and other fixed-income securities using their patented trading technology. It is in many ways a shining example of the power and scalability of technology. 

The company prizes agility and is constantly looking for areas to improve. The MarketAxess Post Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team recognised a requirement for further modernization, not just in terms of the technology it uses, but also in how it operates. Working alongside their security, risk and legal teams, they adopted Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA), which helped the company focus on delivering business value, leaving the management and overhead of the cloud platform to Red Hat.

As part of the modernization initiative, MarketAxess joined a Red Hat Open Innovation Labs residency in July 2021. Since then, five ROSA clusters have been deployed. One brand-new product, SensAI went live in July 2022, and another regulated product is expected to go live at the end of this year. 

The result? Automation has helped eliminate manual steps, encouraged more reuse and less rework, and has resulted in wholesale improvements. Lead time has been reduced from six months to one week, and rather than once a month, deployments now take place multiple times a day, with deployment times down to under ten minutes.

Category: Speed of innovation

Winner: SEAT, S.A.

Spanish car manufacturer SEAT S.A. is the only company that designs, develops, manufactures and markets cars in Spain, and exports to over 75 countries worldwide. The automotive industry, like every other vertical, is heavily reliant on application development. SEAT S.A. is facing one of the biggest business and cultural challenges in its history: leading electrification in Spain and turning the country into a European hub for electric vehicles.

Previously, SEAT S.A. operated using a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, but it had not been updated in recent years and did not offer the capability to use containers or automated deployment. SEAT S.A. sought to modernize its CI/CD platform with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, achieving the goals of providing container capability, improving developer autonomy, laying the foundations for project testing automation and increasing the delivery and agility of its software development. 

Development teams are now the owners of their pipelines and can adapt or execute them whenever necessary. The development teams are also able to deploy automatically (using GitOps tools) with full access to the application logs in the public environments. The paradigm shift of the new CI/CD platform and adoption of the DevOps culture puts the development team at the centre of everything. By adapting these tools and processes, SEAT S.A. is able to achieve maximum productivity and speed.

Learn more: Red Hat Digital Leaders Awards