Government Savings Bank, KASIKORN Business-Technology Group, KTB Computer Services Co., Ltd., and TMB Bank Public Company Named Winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for Thailand

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for Thailand. Government Savings Bank, Kasikorn Business-Technology Group, KTB Computer Services Co., Ltd. and TMB Bank Public Company Limited 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 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 Thailand include:

Category: Cloud-Native Development

Winner: Government Savings Bank (GSB)

A state enterprise that operates as a financial institution, GSB runs 1,060 branches across Thailand and serves more than 22 million customers. It provides its customer groups – including individual consumers, businesses and the public sector – with access to financial services designed to support sustainable development of the country and enhance the future of Thai people. It does so by delivering various services such as account balance inquiries, interbank transfers using mobile phone numbers and bill payments using barcodes through its internet banking and mobile banking apps.

GSB needed a way to speed up time-to-market for new products amidst customer interest in digital financial services offerings while staying ahead of security risks. To deliver this, GSB started an initiative to develop an open banking platform that would host its APIs and provide managed services to both internal and external parties with strong security capabilities. 

GSB migrated to an open source environment based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Application Runtimes, Red Hat 3Scale API Management, Red Hat JBoss Fuse and Red Hat OpenShift, with Red Hat Consulting’s help. By using lightweight APIs with microservices, DevOps and container technologies on top of the environment to automate business processes and improve their process efficiency, GSB was able to optimize costs and launch new digital banking services, helping to improve its customer relationships, speed to market and business agility. With a more modern platform for innovation, GSB has been able to provide premium service quality to its customers.

Category: Digital Transformation
Winner: KASIKORN Business-Technology Group (KBTG)

KBTG is the tech venture of Kasikorn Bank (KBank), one of Thailand’s largest banks. It works as an in-house developer, and partners with fintech firms and tech startups to enhance its digital financial products and provide excellent service delivery amidst changes in the financial sector.

Since KBTG initially deployed many critical business applications on proprietary application servers on the UNIX operating system, it struggled to address changing business requirements in an agile manner and to reduce IT operational costs as the business grew. It also faced limitations in terms of adopting containers as its existing application servers were not lightweight. As such, KBTG’s infrastructure team, K Pro, needed to manually manage its IT infrastructure to ensure that its critical applications were always up and running.  

KBTG overcame these challenges by deploying Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to run its Java applications, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate network and security management, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its stable foundation for all IT workloads and deployments. The new lightweight infrastructure allowed the K Pro team to use component architectures, living documentation and a common toolset. This helped to reduce configuration sprawl, deliver IT resources at speed to support new business demands and free up more IT budget for innovation instead of maintenance, making the K Pro team more productive. The security and reliability of KBTG’s systems increased and allowed KBTG to focus on innovating at the speed and scale required to improve KBank’s customer service. 

Category: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Winner: KTB Computer Services Co., Ltd. (KTBCS)

KTBCS is a subsidiary of Krungthai Bank that provides IT services to various business units in the bank and it is charged with not only modernizing the bank’s existing systems, but also managing and maintaining existing systems and software development.

Krungthai Bank’s Future Banking initiative aims to support the government sector in various fields so the Thai economy can grow and reach higher potential. To support this initiative, KTBCS worked to modernize and optimize the bank’s outdated, complex and costly legacy IT infrastructure. With Red Hat Consulting’s support, KTBCS deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss EAP and Red Hat Data Grid to standardize its platforms for new applications. 

With both tier-1 applications, such as its mobile banking and corporate banking applications, and tier-2 non-financial applications on the new platform, KTBCS has increased its agility and put the bank in a better position for growth. With its Red Hat-based platform, KTBCS can meet business service level agreement (SLA) levels efficiently with scale, while reducing its operational costs and total cost of ownership. 

Category: Digital Transformation and Cloud-Native Development
Winner: TMB Bank Public Company Limited (TMB)

TMB is one of the leading Thai commercial banks that aims to enable customers to have better financial well-being through its innovative financial solutions and services to Thais.

TMB’s existing monolithic platform had challenges to rapidly scale alongside the growth of its digital transactions and support the dynamic nature of its workloads, especially during month-ends and seasonal campaigns when the use of the platform is at its peak. To further achieve its digital transformation and gain business agility, the bank needed a reliable and stable container platform to support the adoption of modern application development practices and deployment of new applications. 

With Red Hat Consulting’s help, TMB implemented Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the new platform for its applications. This enabled TMB to adopt DevOps as well as efficiently adapt and onboard applications according to the dynamic change of consumer needs and regulatory requirements. With faster time-to-market for its services through digital channel and an infrastructure that can scale elastically, TMB can effectively support the growth of its digital banking business despite the highly competitive environment.  

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. The Digital Transformation category recognizes organizations that have successfully addressed IT challenges and delivered business value to effectively compete as a digital enterprise. The Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure category showcases a collaborative public, private or open hybrid cloud deployment. 

Supporting Quotes

Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, senior vice president and general manager, APAC, Red Hat

“2020 has been a year of uncertainties – but also possibilities. It’s inspiring to see how organizations in Asia Pacific are using open source to quickly and effectively meet changing market landscapes and consumer demands. Congratulations to this year’s winners, who we believe will become role models to other organizations looking for ideas to transform their business. We look forward to working with our customers to help them address the many real challenges our customers face today, and unlock the unlimited possibilities of taking the business forward.”

Sarawut Nanakorn, executive vice president, IT Planning and Development, Government Savings Bank 

“Since 2019, our business focus has been to achieve sustainable growth while making contributions to society. Red Hat solutions have empowered us to do so by enabling us to launch our open banking platform, which will enable us to promote collaborations and connections among organizations in the exchange of information. Engaging with Red Hat has allowed us to speed up time-to-market, increase agility, and respond more efficiently to customer needs.”

Surapan Chaimahapruek, assistant managing director, KASIKORN Business-Technology Group
“Having a reliable and efficient IT infrastructure is crucial to helping KBank continue delivering a seamless, delightful customer experience. By using Red Hat’s open source solutions to provide a stable, automated and secure platform, the K Pro team can ensure that our critical applications – be it new or existing ones – are always running properly. This empowers us to focus more on higher value tasks that will help the bank to be more customer-centric and sustain competitiveness.” 

Wisit R. Sakuldilok, managing director, KTB Computer Services Co., Ltd
“Our vision is to be a leading technology provider to enable the future digital business. Addressing changes in customer behavior and digital technology, KTB Computer Services Co., Ltd. needs to become more agile and allocate resources efficiently to retain competitiveness while supporting our clients. The open platform, cloud enablement as well as digital innovation enables us to achieve this by reducing our operational costs, developing more secure and stable products in an agile manner, and supporting new processes as our clients transform their business to digital business.”  

Markus Dolenga, chief technology and operating officer, TMB Bank Public Company Limited
“TMB is committed to offering the best financial solutions for customers’ financial well-being. We have taken the first step to achieve that by using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to modernize our applications and run on a container platform. This move is integral in enabling us to speed up our software delivery process to support national cashless efforts and expand our digital banking initiatives, while ensuring the reliability of our systems.”