Red Hat EMEA Digital Leaders Awards 2022: And the regional winners are...

In my previous post we shared the names of the winners of Red Hat EMEA Digital Leaders Awards across three main categories: App Dev, Automation and Infrastructure, in addition to special awards for Cultural Change and Speed of Innovation.

This marks the second year the awards have been held in collaboration with IDC and Intel, with the goal of identifying innovative and transformative digital leaders using Red Hat technologies and services. The awards highlight some of the industry changing innovations our customers are delivering.

Since its inception, it became very clear that choosing a winner was incredibly difficult. With so many demonstrably strong entries from across EMEA showcasing some of the very best uses of Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies, we wanted to ensure that our regional customers were getting the recognition they deserved. The innovative use of automation, containers and Kubernetes, and infrastructure spreads far across the region, with many shining examples from customers in both the public and private sectors.

So, it is with great delight that we can share the work of our regional winners covering Central Europe, Northwest Europe, Mediterranean Europe and META. Here are their stories.

Central Europe: BNP Paribas, Poland

BNP Paribas Bank Polska made a decision to build GOonline, a new internet retail banking application. The design team opted to build the application using microservices and agile methodologies.

The solution was built in a production environment based on Red Hat OpenShift consisting of over 80 microservices and developed by several separate development teams with different skill levels. In addition to the front-end solution and a dedicated back-end, the application also implements an extensive range of shared services and integrates with over 35 systems inside the bank. 

Using advanced CI/CD processes, the bank is able to implement changes in production several times a day and with a multicluster architecture that enables the bank to maintain 100% availability during upgrades. The bank’s developers can now focus on building applications for GOonline’s 1.3 million users while maintaining its portability and independence from any one specific cloud environment.

Northwest Europe: PostNord Strålfors AB

After over a century of growth and technical evolution since its founding in 1919, Nordic communications solution provider PostNord Strålfors AB had found that its legacy solutions were becoming increasingly difficult to run and maintain. Additionally, the legacy solutions were slowing processes between development, infrastructure and operations.

The adoption of Red Hat OpenShift has enabled PostNord Strålfors to massively reduce time to market at scale for new solutions and provide much improved service reliability for its customers. This September, it launched a payment service product fully deployed in Red Hat OpenShift that was designed using a microservices architecture.

The easy-to-use management interface played an important role in providing a uniform feel to both development and operations teams. This container adoption has facilitated new levels of transparency enabling PostNord Strålfors to create common development streams that provide visibility into potential and real ROI.

Mediterranean Europe: Italgas

In an effort to reduce costs and modernize its core systems, Milan-headquartered gas distribution company Italgas has undertaken a monumental cloud migration mission, moving all of its legacy systems from bare metal to IaaS virtual machines (VMs). 

During the project, Italgas worked with Red Hat Consulting to design the target architecture, deploy it on Microsoft Azure and define the right geographical disaster recovery architecture to guarantee its recovery points and times. With Red Hat OpenShift, Italgas is now able to provision environments in minutes and is able to redeploy a software version in seconds.

Italgas has migrated all of its core application environments to Red Hat OpenShift, going from 120 VMs to just 32 VMs that run two OpenShift clusters. This has significantly reduced infrastructure costs and increased speed-to-release for new features. The adoption of Red Hat technology has resulted in Italgas designing applications differently, which in turn has resulted in more innovative applications. Another key advantage is the integration with a consistent API catalog which allows Italgas to communicate effectively with a large number of internal and external systems.

META: Garanti BBVA Technology

Two years ago, Turkish financial services company Garanti BBVA Technology recognised the growing importance of IT automation. A new team was formed focused on IT automation with the goal of centralizing automation and creating a platform that all teams could use in the same way.

Prior to the adoption of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Garanti BBVA was using a number of different automation products and was spending time fixing recurring IT issues. Now, with Ansible Automation Platform, Garanti is better able to discover non-standard configurations and notify engineers accordingly. This proactive approach has decreased Garanti BBVA’s problem rate and improved customer satisfaction.

Previously complex and time-consuming controls are now done in minutes with minimal effort. Since engineers spend less time catching misconfigurations, they have more time to use their skills for value-added work rather than performing repetitive daily tasks. Furthermore, different teams can view any configuration data from the platform so they no longer need to spend time trying to reach each other.

Learn more: Red Hat Digital Leaders Awards