Red Hat honors National Australia Bank, SA Power Networks and Spark New Zealand for pioneering open source initiatives at the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2024 for Australia and New Zealand region

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2024 for the Australia and New Zealand region. Red Hat recognized the noteworthy milestones achieved by National Australia Bank, SA Power Networks, and Spark New Zealand for their innovative use of Red Hat solutions to improve business outcomes.

In an ever-evolving global business landscape, the Asia Pacific region (APAC) remains resilient and is, in fact, in the midst of rapid growth. With its dynamic economies, diverse cultures, and vast consumer bases, APAC’s promising territories present growth opportunities for businesses big and small alike. Technology remains a pivotal factor in shaping the business landscape, helping enterprises scale and innovate.

Embodying this year’s theme, “Unlock what’s next”, the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards celebrate Red Hat customers who have harnessed the power of open source technologies to drive transformation and innovation. These customers are recognized for demonstrating how enterprises can overcome the dual challenge of managing escalating infrastructure costs alongside evolving business demands. According to the Red Hat 2024 Global Tech Trends, the top funding priorities for businesses across the APAC region are building cloud-native applications, improving digital user experience and accelerating application/service delivery. These findings highlight the importance of innovative solutions in the awards’ five key categories that reflect areas that can empower organizations to navigate business challenges faced today: Digital Transformation, Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud-Native Development, Automation, and Resilience.

The winners were chosen for their outstanding use of Red Hat solutions, demonstrating significant contributions to their business objectives. Each organization exemplifies the transformative potential of open source technology, pioneering advancements in business processes, enhancing productivity, fostering innovation and fortifying resilience in the face of challenges. Their success stories underscore the pivotal role of Red Hat in empowering enterprises across the APAC region to achieve unparalleled growth through strategic deployment of open source solutions.

Category: Digital Transformation and Automation

Winner: National Australia Bank

National Australia Bank (NAB) is one of the largest financial institutions in Australia that provides a comprehensive range of banking services to individuals, businesses, and institutions. It was through the need for improved reporting and streamlined operations and systems, as well as significant resource constraints, that NAB realized the need to transform its IT operations through automation. Their journey with Red Hat evolved through several key phases such as platform security, Linux patching, and disaster recovery automation. Now, NAB is fully optimizing operations after having successfully onboarded multiple teams, including Database, Digital Forensics and Cyber Security.

The investment in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allowed NAB to address resource constraints by efficiently managing an extensive inventory of thousands of devices without increasing headcount and compromising performance. The integration of diverse systems also enabled NAB to consolidate various systems and processes into a unified automation framework, improving efficiency and quality of services, benefiting both customers and employees by providing fast and more reliable banking services. These contributed to millions of cost savings annually and positioned NAB as a front-runner in the ANZ financial services industry.

Category: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Automation

Winner: Spark New Zealand

'With 24 regional business hubs, 61 retail hubs stores, more than 5,000 employees, and over 22MW of data centre capacity built, Spark New Zealand Limited is New Zealand’s largest telecommunications and digital services provider. Their services range from mobile, broadband, entertainment, and cloud services, to high-tech solutions such as AI, IoT and 5G. As a long-time consumer of Red Hat products, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift, Spark wanted to use these solutions in a more sophisticated and centralized manner, delivering a platform for the future of 5G and beyond while servicing the needs of existing generations of network functions.

As lifecycle updates for technology stack become more frequent and rapid, Spark was committed to providing consistency for operations while ensuring customization for complex workloads. Working with Red Hat enabled Spark to achieve faster, more coordinated, and reliable deployments, improving operational costs and efficiency. Apart from pulling forward in project timelines, Red Hat solutions also improved security and compliance while modernizing applications, reducing risk in cost of outages and brand damage for both Spark and customers reliant on critical communication services.

Category: Digital Transformation and Automation

Winner: SA Power Networks

SA Power Networks is South Australia’s sole electricity distributor, providing electricity to 99% of the State’s population – more than 1.7 million customers. Increasing operational and project delivery demands have driven the business to look at new and innovative ways to streamline repetitive tasks and reduce after-hours patching work. SA Power Networks' bespoke cloud configuration tool was adding unnecessary complexity to processes for infrastructure builds and deployment, and a lack of automation and standard tooling was preventing improved ways of working across the IT department. To address this, the team decided to build a new set of capabilities to scale IT operations and improve cost savings.

Working with longtime Red Hat partner Advent One, SA Power Networks deployed the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to build, configure, and orchestrate patching its Linux and Windows environments. Additionally, SA Power Networks is trialing Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift to increase container management capabilities for new projects. As a result, saving 100 hours per month on repetitive tasks, highlighting the significance and time savings that can be achieved by automating operational tasks. In addition to that, there are positive flow-ons across the IT department as SA Power Networks can now standardize infrastructure and delivery builds, reducing its manual patching input. This has removed human error and increased traceability.

SA Power Networks is playing a key role in helping South Australia reach its goal of net-100% renewable energy by 2030 and zero emissions by 2050. Continuing to provide dependable services and keeping systems secure is therefore pivotal to SA Power Networks and for everyone living in South Australia.

Supporting Quotes:

Marjet Andriesse, senior vice president and general manager, APJC, Red Hat

“Despite the uncertain economic conditions in 2024, we have seen the remarkable milestones achieved by our customers. This year, we want to highlight the innovative strides of these organizations at the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2024 as they leverage advanced technologies to drive business initiatives. Open source remains the key to help organizations uncover what is next and pave the way for success with the right tools and expertise.”

Jason Cooper, manager, network application network security and automation, National Australia Bank

“NAB has leveraged Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to simplify our environment through automation, allowing us to reduce manual operational tasks and improving our compliance and security remediation timeframes. We started working with Red Hat in 2018, drawn to the opportunity to adopt automation practices in-house with their support. Ansible has delivered with the flexibility and power we needed to enhance overall efficiency.”

Nilay Rathod, technology automation and services lead, Spark New Zealand

“The team embarked on this project with one aim – to automate everything without compromises and create a platform of the future. As a longtime customer of Red Hat, we wanted to continue this partnership by taking it to another level: to challenge the way technology is used to bring more benefits to our customers. Thank you to the Red Hat team for working with us on this project.”

Phil Manning, infrastructure design manager, SA Power Networks

“A key goal of this project was freeing up our people’s time to work on what truly mattered, and automation became a clear solution that would have organization-wide benefit. Using open-source solutions, as opposed to bespoke or proprietary solutions, has also encouraged a culture of open sharing among our teams. Thanks to Advent One and Red Hat, we’re thrilled to have extracted more benefits than we envisaged from this project.”