Announcing the winners of the 12th annual Red Hat Innovation Awards

Every year the Red Hat Innovation Awards highlights some of the most innovative and exciting uses of Red Hat solutions, capturing a small glimpse into what is possible with open source technology. In its 12th 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 - BBVA, Dirección Nacional de Migraciones de la República Argentina (DNM), IAG, Lufthansa Technik and UPS - will be honored during Red Hat Summit 2018 taking place this week in San Francisco.

The overall 2018 Red Hat Innovator of the Year will be chosen by the community through online voting. Voting is now open and will close at 11:59 p.m. PT on Wednesday, May 9. To vote for the 2018 Red Hat Innovator of the Year, visit www.redhat.com/en/success-stories/innovation-awards. The winner will be announced during the Red Hat Summit general session on Thursday, May 10.

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

2018 Red Hat Innovation Award Winners

BBVA

BBVA is a customer-centric, global financial services group based in Spain. Driven by its efforts to become a digital company, BBVA set out to transform how it provides and maintains IT services. The key drivers for its digital transformation lie not just in technology, but also in its talent pool. It has more than 12,000 developers working around the world and expects to re-skill 20,000 professionals to work as software developers.

The transformation began with the development of an updated customer website and new mobile apps, as well as ATM and IVR services. However, this new functionality also increased the transaction and load rate that the back end applications had to support. In order to meet this demand, technology changes were necessary. Having implemented Red Hat solutions successfully on previous projects, BBVA chose to make Red Hat technology a key piece of its new cloud platform. No small task, the BBVA platform’s goals were to provide a single, global cloud platform that is fully automated, self-serve and data-centric, combining real-time and batch data. BBVA built its platform using several solutions, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite, as it’s foundation aiming to initially migrate to the new BBVA cloud Java-based services application. The platform was built to support existing workloads of critical processes like new credit card contracts, claims, loans and mortgages. BBVA expects its platform to reduce costs both for the company and the customer, increase efficiency and increase analytics, providing an overall improved experience for its customers.

Read BBVA's full Red Hat success story

Dirección Nacional de Migraciones de la República Argentina (DNM)

A main focus of an immigration office is helping ensure that people visiting the country have a safe stay. At DNM, that means focusing on the 73 million people entering and exiting Argentina every year, plus about a quarter of a million residence permits annually issued. Security and efficiency at the border are dependent on data management practices to make informed decisions in real time. Manually processing millions of interactions was a common practice at DNM. DNM engaged with Red Hat Consulting in order to move from multiple data sources, manual procedures and outdated practices to a real-time platform that enables data-driven decision making and AI-assisted analysis, based on a strong DevOps culture.

Aiming to avoid manual processing of large volumes of data, DNM transformed its technology and developed the Migration Information Analysis Platform (SAM for its Spanish acronym). Numerous Red Hat technologies and services were used to consolidate databases from different departments, public and private sources, into a single searchable data warehouse: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Ansible Tower, Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat JBoss Fuse and Red Hat Satellite. Since the introduction of SAM, DNM reports that it has experienced a 90 percent reduction in the time spent by analysts to detect and examine suspicious profiles. This enables the team to focus on data management and analysis that can help control, prevent, and detect migration offenses through the use of innovative technology resources.

Read DNM's full Red Hat success story

IAG

To simplify its data infrastructure and deliver better customer experiences, general insurance group IAG (headquartered in Sydney, Australia) needed to streamline more than 20 data warehouses all built using different technologies with interdependencies and replicated data. This was a critical part of the insurer becoming a more data-driven company. IAG engaged Red Hat Consulting to deploy Red Hat OpenStack Platform as the foundation for its updated data environment. Red Hat technology including Red Hat Ansible Automation, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is bringing together disparate data sources into a single, scalable private cloud-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution to improve customer experiences. Since deploying the new environment, IAG reports that it has reduced both its core claims application platforms and policy systems applications from 16 to just one each.

Read IAG's full Red Hat success story

Lufthansa Technik

As technology advances, the possibilities for the airline industry increase. Lufthansa Technik, a leading provider of maintenance, repair and overhaul for civil aircraft, its engines and components, has a vision for the future. That vision included a cloud-based platform that could be an aircraft condition monitoring solution for troubleshooters, fleet and record management, and for predictive maintenance. Knowing it would need to move to the cloud and find a solution that could run multiple products, Lufthansa Technik chose its long-time technology partner, Red Hat, to help develop the cloud platform. AVIATAR was created using DevOps methodology and key Red Hat technologies including Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform running on Microsoft Azure, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP), Red Hat JBoss Fuse, Red Hat Data Grid, Red Hat Gluster Storage, Red Hat Ansible Tower, Red Hat 3scale API Management and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This solution enabled AVIATAR’s stable, faster development and operation and built a foundation that can help increase the safety, efficiency and reliability of airline fleets worldwide. Lufthansa Technik’s project also resulted in a culture shift and a new way of working as a more open, collaborative team. This organizational (DevOps) change has enabled the AVIATAR team to think differently about its digital future and respond by helping to bring new technologies to market quicker than before.

Read Lufthansa Technik’s full Red Hat success story

UPS

UPS is a global leader in logistics. For years, the company has harnessed its vast data streams and applied advanced data analytics to generate network improvements and valuable customer solutions. UPS’s Enhanced Dynamic Global Execution program (EDGE) illustrates this innovative spirit. EDGE reflects the ingenuity of UPS IT and engineering professionals in pursuit of solutions that can increase UPS’s capacity, capability and reliability. One of the important EDGE projects is the Center Inside Planning and Execution System (CIPE), a mobile digital platform that crunches operational data in real time to provide information to UPS operations managers. These data-driven insights on package volume and other metrics empower UPS facility operators to make better decisions on how to manage packages flows and staff package sorting facilities. UPS reports that CIPE has generated meaningful operational efficiencies, cost savings and customer service improvements and is critical to UPS’s global smart logistics network. To create CIPE, UPS deployed a solution comprised of several Red Hat technologies including Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat JBoss Fuse and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Read UPS's full Red Hat success story

Honorable Mentions

Through the last 12 years, we have consistently heard from our panel of judges that there were other nominations that they wished could be recognized for their accomplishments. New this year, we are proud to recognize an additional group of Red Hat customers who are setting a high bar for innovation:

• British Army: Stemming from the need to improve the development and operational support for the applications delivered by its Information Application Services (IAS) team, the British Army used Red Hat technologies including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Ansible Tower, Red Hat Ansible Automation and  Red Hat Enterprise Linux Resilient Storage Add-On to improve efficiency and agility. As a result, IAS is now seen as a leading practice inside of the British Army for hosting, application development and support, and is attracting new funding from business units to deliver capability. Read more about how the British Army is working with Red Hat.

• Duke Health: Faced with demands from the research community to have a more agile computing environment that allows for faster access to Protected Health Information (PHI), Duke Health worked with Red Hat to develop its Protected Analytics Computing Environment (PACE). Built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Satellite, PACE is designed to reduce risk of accidental disclosure of PHI, reduce time of creation and delivery of compute resources and empower users with the ability to install approved applications and access analytic resources. With PACE, Duke Health has reported that it has experienced reduced delivery time for access to PHI and necessary compute access for analysis from 90 days to 48 hours, a reduction of 97.78 percent.

• Experian: As the company grew, Experian wanted to move its infrastructure into an automate-first mindset to speed deployments. It deployed a solution including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat Ansible Tower, Red Hat Ansible Automation, Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Satellite to improve the response rate of the products provided through its Passport eCareNEXT services. Equipped with a more agile platform, Experian has reduced the total response rate of transactions by 3.7 seconds, helping it to speed delivery and meet client needs more efficiently.

• IP Australia: Due to legacy information and communication technology (ICT) systems, IP Australia - the Australian Government agency that administers intellectual property rights and legislation relating to patents, trademarks, designs and plant breeder's rights - faced long lead-times and high costs for projects with an ICT element. To help transform the agency, IP Australia worked with Red Hat to help its Rights In One (RIO) program modernize its backend administration systems. The platform was built using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, JBoss EAP, Red Hat Ansible Automation and Red Hat Satellite. With its modern, open source-based platform, IP Australia reports that it has experienced reduced set-up time from 4-5 months to 45 minutes, reduced outage times by 80 percent and reduced system downtime from patching and server updates - something that previously a required complete system shutdown - resulting in both time and cost savings.