Building better businesses: Announcing our Red Hat EMEA Digital Leaders 2021

Life moves fast. Innovation moves faster. We’re all in a rush to keep up. Every now and then, it’s important to hit the pause button and reflect on achievements. Reflection isn’t just good for the soul. The accomplishments of others can be the gateway to our own progress. By taking inspiration and learnings from others, we can overcome organizational groupthink, draw on a more diverse pool of ideas and experiences, and shortcut our way to solutions and success.

This is the thinking behind the Red Hat EMEA Digital Leaders Awards—a new program in association with Intel and IDC celebrating the best open source projects using Red Hat technology and services

We received so many strong stories, from so many different countries and industries. When businesses apply open source solutions and working principles to their transformation projects, every KPI—profitability, cost savings, customer satisfaction, employee productivity and market share—is improved.

It has been inspiring, and humbling, to see how Red Hat is helping to build better businesses, and a better world.

The winners were recognized in three categories:  Open Transformation, Cloud Native, and Hybrid Cloud.

Category: Open Transformation Award

Winner: Turkcell

To support a shift to become a digital first business, Turkcell has established a new culture of continuous innovation. It decided to replace its monolithic IT architecture with a microservices and container-based environment that has an open, flexible and speed-oriented architecture.

The new infrastructure has helped Turkcell to embrace innovative technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, and artificial intelligence (AI). Turkcell has also created a platform for data science, which has enabled it to make AI capabilities available to everyone in the organization. Employees are actively encouraged to use the new platform to bring to life ideas that have a positive business impact.

The results have been stunning. Turkcell has more than 50 different AI-powered services running on its platform, including digital onboarding for new customers, chatbots, fraud detection, emotion detection for its music streaming service and text-to-speech conversion to deliver commercial audio and smart voice assistant services. Several applications have been created with a social good agenda. Turkcell has roughly halved time to market of AI-powered applications and seen a 50-70% reduction in the cost of hardware servers; while the launch of its ‘AI innovations-as-a-service’ division has established a new revenue stream by offering digital services to enterprise customers.

Category: Cloud Native Applications 

Winner: DAB Pumps

DAB Pumps, which provides water technology solutions, built a complex and robust cloud native architecture on Red Hat OpenShift. The architecture delivers strategically important business services with data delivered in real-time using Red Hat Application Services, Red Hat single sign on, stream processing, databases and data management and a blockchain fabric. It also integrated these new cloud native technologies with its core business legacy application environments. 

The implementation enables DAB Pumps to manage customer profiles and customer activity, while interrogating key legacy business systems. It gives DAB Pumps a competitive edge in its market by allowing it to generate and manage sales orders in real time, and by having end-to-end management of the entire customer data lifecycle.

With its solution, DAP Pumps has improved time to market by 60% while boosting employee productivity and enhancing the customer experience.

Category: Hybrid Cloud 

Winner: Santander Global Technology and Operations

The Santander CaaS platform leveraged a hybrid cloud strategy to develop a complete solution to standardize and speed up deployments. The solution allows Santander to increase its agility and innovation while reducing costs, by enabling more choice of deployment and migration platforms.

The project made use of Red Hat Consulting to help in the design and deployment of the CaaS solution; Red Hat Technical Account Managers to support and improve solution usage; and Red Hat Engineering to contribute to the upstream Kubernetes project for the benefit of the whole community. 

The technological aspects, including Red Hat OpenShift 4 and Operators on Red hat OpenShift, allows Santander to manage Kubernetes native applications in an effective, automated, and scalable way. It is also paving the way to validate and adopt new technologies, such as service mesh, serverless or multi-cluster federation for a variety of use cases.