To kick off Red Hat Summit 2019, we’re proud to announce the winners of the 2019 Red Hat Innovation Awards. Now in its 13th year, the Red Hat Innovation Awards recognize the technological achievements of Red Hat customers around the world who demonstrate creative thinking, determined problem-solving and transformative uses of Red Hat technology.

This year's winners—BP, Deutsche Bank, Emirates NBD, HCA Healthcare and Kohl's—will be honored on the main stage this week at Red Hat Summit 2019 in Boston.

A community-wide, online voting process will determine which of these customers will be honored as the 2019 Red Hat Innovator of the Year. Voting is now open and will close at 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday, May 8. The winner will be announced during the Red Hat Summit general session on Thursday, May 9.

Let’s take a closer look at this year’s winners.

2019 Red Hat Innovation Award Winners

BP

BP is a global energy business with operations in more than 70 countries. BP has embraced what it calls the "dual challenge"–the world’s demand for more energy but with fewer emissions–and one of its strategic priorities is modernizing the whole group, simplifying its processes and enhancing productivity through digital solutions.

BP’s AES (Application Engineering Services) Digital Conveyor is an industry-leading, one-click, end-to-end CI/CD solution. The Conveyor is designed to empower developers and engineering teams in the field to provision their own CI/CD pipelines and underlying platforms in real time, all from the simple click of a button. The combination of a fully automated Digital Conveyor and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform provides the company with a truly modern and flexible development platform, enabling self-service and the wider benefits of containerization and microservices.

The Digital Conveyor also allows for the development of new environments that are standardized across the business, depending on needs, helping teams to be more innovative and agile, delivering iterative and tangible business benefits more rapidly. The project encouraged innovation and collaboration, increasing DevOps maturity across the delivery and development teams in the process.

Read BP's full Red Hat success story.

Deutsche Bank

In December 2015, Deutsche Bank kicked off a bank-wide strategy that began with a directive to its engineers: support the goal of providing everything-as-a-service. As Germany’s leading bank, Deutsche Bank embarked on a journey to become more technology-led, consolidate and simplify its application estate, improve both developer productivity and server utilization, and, in doing so, reduce the running costs of infrastructure. Previously, the majority of its development needs had involved too many manual processes, resulting in months-long timelines. The biggest challenges facing the project was moving Deutsche Bank away from the traditional processes and tooling associated with virtualization, as well as legacy infrastructure.

After an initial research phase, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform was selected to serve as the base platform-as-a-service product. Red Hat technology has enabled Deutsche Bank to be more agile, flexible and deliver applications in days instead of months. In six months, they went from 45 projects, one environment and 60 users to 6,000 active monthly users working across 4,000 projects and 15 unique environments. As a result, Deutsche Bank is getting products to market quicker and employees benefit from more time to be innovative and less time on managing infrastructure. There’s also been a culture shift towards an open source way of working, embracing collaborative principles and DevOps.

Read Deutsche Bank's full Red Hat success story and the press release.

Emirates NBD

In 2017, Emirates NBD embarked on an $270 million digital transformation to deliver more innovative digital banking services to its customers faster than its rapidly changing competition. As one of the transformation’s first milestones, Emirates NBD built its own private cloud in six months, which was a first for the Middle Eastern banking sector. It used Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as well as other Red Hat technologies including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat 3scale API Management, Red Hat Fuse and Red Hat AMQ.

Emirates NBD calls its private cloud “Sahab,” which means “white cloud” in Arabic, and it was a game-changer for the bank. Sahab is now enabling Emirates NBD to drive more innovation at speed and achieve 100% application availability through its broad range of benefits.This includes reduced IT development time as well as increased resiliency, flexibility, insight, cost efficiency and quality control.

Following Sahab’s launch, Emirates NBD is now focused on driving its continued maturity and expansion. This means progressively unlocking the bank’s open banking potential through the use of open APIs and a dedicated developer portal, and which also enables more agile software development at scale internally. Simultaneously, Emirates NBD is now working closely with local universities, FinTechs and technology players to strengthen and expand the Middle East’s high-potential open source community.

Read Emirates NBD's full Red Hat success story.

HCA Healthcare

Sepsis is an overwhelming response to infection that turns the body’s immune system against itself. In the absence of early detection, it can rapidly lead to tissue damage, severe organ failure, and death. HCA Healthcare, one of the nation's leading providers of healthcare services, is now using artificial intelligence based on data from millions of hospitalizations to detect sepsis up to 18 hours earlier than traditional screenings.

Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for their private cloud, as well as Red Hat Ansible Tower for automation, HCA Healthcare’s data science and clinical teams developed Sepsis Prediction & Optimization of Therapy (SPOT), an algorithm and workflow for the early detection and treatment of sepsis. SPOT continuously monitors critical data points in patients’ electronic health records, and sends alerts to hospital staff and care teams within minutes of important changes. The organization completed its enterprise rollout of SPOT to 164 hospitals in late 2018, and through combined sepsis prevention efforts is reducing mortality rates and saving lives. In this way, HCA Healthcare's data science team is enabling in-depth data analysis, modeling, and product development to support positive change in clinical workflows, and supporting the organization’s ability to function as a Learning Health System—where past care continuously informs and improves future care.  

Read HCA Healthcare's full Red Hat success story.

Kohl’s

Kohl’s is a leading omnichannel retailer with more than 1,100 stores in 49 states. Kohl’s is in the process of becoming a cloud-first company and, as part of its continued transformation, was looking for a platform to support application modernization and partner support for its cloud migration initiative. The company sought to build an advanced but simple solution that could provide a flexible, scalable, self-service-based platform on the company’s journey to drive IT transformation, accelerate development and reduce cloud cost over time.

After participating in a pilot in 2017, Kohl’s elected to build its platform using Red Hat’s open source container management platform running in the cloud. The platform supports Kohl’s needs, including reacting rapidly to customers’ needs and implementing consistent changes to the infrastructure. Since beginning this journey on the platform, Kohl’s has seen greater workload optimization and easing of day two support. In addition, the project team’s embrace of open culture practices like DevOps continues to influence the rest of the company. These teams are championing silo-busting and new collaborations that continue to drive innovation at Kohl’s.


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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.

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