Announcing the winners of the 20th annual Red Hat Innovation Awards

For two decades, the Red Hat Innovation Awards have celebrated the groundbreaking technological achievements of our customers worldwide. These organizations demonstrate visionary problem-solving, leveraging the power of open source to drive significant impact across industries and society. This year’s winners are ARSAT, Emirates NBD, One NZ  and TD. 

A community-wide, online voting process will determine which customer is distinguished as the 2026 Red Hat Innovator of the Year. Voting is now open and will close at 9 a.m. ET on May 7th. The winner will be announced on May 11, 2026, during Red Hat Summit. To vote for the 2026 Red Hat Innovator of the Year, visit www.redhat.com/en/success-stories/innovation-awards. 

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

ARSAT

ARSAT (Empresa Argentina de Soluciones Satelitales Sociedad Anónima) is a telecommunications infrastructure provider serving more than 1,500 clients across 4,000 technology projects throughout Argentina and internationally. Its operations include managing the largest fiber-optic network in Argentina, 2 geostationary satellites that provide satellite connectivity across the Americas, a datacenter offering cloud and digital services, and an open digital television network. The state-owned organization employs approximately 600 people, about 80% of whom are technical experts.

To help the company respond rapidly to changes in technology and unify AI development, ARSAT deployed Red Hat OpenShift AI. By augmenting network operations center (NOC) capabilities with AI, ARSAT can maximize efficiency and respond faster to client needs. With Red Hat’s AI solution, the organization can reinforce data sovereignty, increase network intelligence, expand connectivity and boost innovation.

 Read ARSAT’s full Red Hat success story.

Emirates NBD 

Emirates NBD is one of the leading banking groups in the Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey, serving more than 20 million customers across multiple countries. The bank offers a full range of products and services, including retail banking, corporate and institutional banking, Islamic banking, investment banking, private banking, asset management, global markets and treasury, and brokerage operations. To meet demand for innovative, 24x7 banking services, Emirates NBD needed to standardize its infrastructure and digital platforms.

As part of its effort to unify fragmented environments, Emirates NBD consolidated its virtual machines and container workloads using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. It is also using Red Hat OpenShift AI to maximize graphic processing unit (GPU) resources for AI services. This approach provides enterprise-grade resilience, operational efficiency, and scalability, meaning the bank can release new products faster, offer services 24x7 and deliver a consistent experience for customers worldwide.

Read Emirates NBD’s full Red Hat success story.

One NZ

One New Zealand provides telecommunications services to more than 2.3 million mobile connections and fixed line and ICT services to approximately 110,000 business, enterprise, and government customers. To meet growing expectations for uninterrupted connectivity services, the company needed a modern, scalable platform that could support innovation and growth over the next decade.

To achieve this, One New Zealand established the One Horizontal Cloud platform, powered by Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. By unifying previously fragmented architectures on 1 cohesive cloud foundation, One New Zealand is reducing delivery times and costs and rolling out new services faster.

Read One NZ’s full Red Hat success story.

TD 

More than 28 million customers bank with TD Canada Trust (TD), which has around 2,200 branches and campuses across North America. To deliver uninterrupted, always-on banking for its customers, TD needed a modern, scalable network infrastructure that could support rapid change while keeping services reliable.  

TD has standardized on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate network management. With a unified, automated approach, the bank has reduced technology provisioning and upgrade times from months to days without compromising stability and security. It has also freed the network team and engineers from repetitive, out-of-hours tasks—improving work-life balance and allowing them to focus on problem-solving and innovation.

Read TD’s full Red Hat success story. 

Honorable mentions

We also extend our recognition to this year’s honorable mentions in the LATAM and APAC regions. In LATAM, Bancolombia, Banorte, IMSS are acknowledged for their significant achievements.

Each year, Red Hat also proudly hosts the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards, celebrating the technological achievements of our customers in the APAC region who demonstrate creative thinking, determined problem solving, and innovative application of Red Hat solutions. This year’s APAC awards recognized numerous winners across 12 different countries for their leadership in categories including digital transformation, hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud-native development, automation and resilience, and the newly added AI and Emerging Tech.