Chunghwa Telecom and E.SUN Bank Named Winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for Taiwan

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for Taiwan. Chunghwa Telecom and E.SUN Bank were honored at the Red Hat Forum Asia Pacific 2020 today for their exceptional and innovative use of Red Hat solutions.

In response to the recent global events that are causing consumer shifts, many organizations are accelerating their digital transformation efforts to adapt. In a November 2019 study sponsored by Red Hat, 95% of APAC executives surveyed said digital transformation has gained importance^[1] and perceived it as a strategy for both survival and growth in the new normal. This has increased the need to use innovative technologies to create new business models, products or services.

Since there is no one-size-fits-all blueprint for digital transformation, this year’s Red Hat Forum Asia Pacific aims to inspire organizations to unleash the power of open source technologies to achieve their short-term goals and future-proof their business for the next normal. To support that, the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 recognizes the technological achievements of organizations that demonstrate creative thinking, determined problem solving and creative use of Red Hat solutions to make a difference in their business, industry or society.

The winners were selected based on the impact of their Red Hat deployments on their business goals, industry and communities, as well as the uniqueness of vision for the project. They displayed how open source platforms and culture have helped them improve productivity, agility and cost savings, while empowering them to address future challenges and emerging trends more confidently and effectively. This year’s awards honored 27 APAC organizations across five categories: digital transformation, hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud-native development, automation and resilience. This year’s winners for Taiwan include:

Categories: Digital Transformation and Resilience
Winner: Chunghwa Telecom

Chunghwa Telecom is an integrated telecommunication service provider in Taiwan. It offers domestic and international fixed communication, mobile communication, broadband, internet services and enterprise ICT solutions such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence services. 

With each business unit running on its own data center, Chunghwa Telecom found it challenging to centrally manage its multiple data centers and ensure operational efficiency. This spurred the telco to move its mobile business group’s legacy business support systems (BSS) to private cloud, and migrate some existing applications to a new microservices architecture by using Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Fuse, Red Hat AMQ, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The mobile business group also deployed APIs on Red Hat OpenShift to simplify facility management, issue tracking, HR management, real-time billing, order management and e-commerce.

The new microservices architecture allowed Chunghwa Telecom’s mobile business group to shorten its software development life cycle from three months to 14 days. It has also reduced its services deployment time from one day to 10 minutes.

Categories: Digital Transformation and Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Winner: E.SUN Bank

E.SUN Bank delivers comprehensive financial services to customers through its 139 branches in Taiwan and 28 branches across U.S. and Asia Pacific. It places long-term focus on financial innovations to improve the lifestyle of its customers and is committed to providing the best customer experiences and personalized services with its online/offline integration.

To embrace the digital era and place customers as its primary focus, E.SUN Bank is one of the first financial organizations in Taiwan to develop its own core banking system and base it on a microservices architecture. This helps E.SUN Bank enhance its business agility and get ahead of its competitors. It also collaborated with Red Hat Open Innovation Labs to fully utilize microservices and effectively adopt DevOps processes. 

E.SUN Bank adopted an open platform and microservices architecture to use standardized container technology and microservice development capabilities. It also worked with Red Hat to combine its DevOps know-how to innovate faster and deliver better services and user experiences. Additionally, the new core system was designed to allow flexibility for future business development, using its automatic scaling capabilities to handle spikes in traffic from large numbers of transactions, thereby ensuring the reliability of the bank’s systems.

The Digital Transformation category recognizes organizations that have successfully addressed IT challenges and delivered business value to effectively compete as a digital enterprise. The Resilience category recognizes businesses that have successfully displayed agility and resilience amidst the changing conditions to help their customers address the new normal using Red Hat technology. The Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure category showcases a collaborative public, private or open hybrid cloud deployment.

Supporting Quotes

Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, senior vice president and general manager, APAC, Red Hat

“2020 has been a year of uncertainties – but also possibilities. It’s inspiring to see how organizations in Asia Pacific are using open source to quickly and effectively meet changing market landscapes and consumer demands. Congratulations to this year’s winners, who we believe will become role models to other organizations looking for ideas to transform their business. We look forward to working with our customers to help them address the many real challenges our customers face today, and unlock the unlimited possibilities of taking the business forward.”

Dr. Cheng Jeu-Yih, chief information officer, Chunghwa Telecom 
“Modernizing our BSS with Red Hat’s flexible open source solutions has given us the confidence to be able to adapt to changing customer expectations quickly and effectively. With container-based microservices and a cloud-native architecture, we can deliver IT services faster and accelerate speed to market to delight customers. Given the benefits we’ve gained from the modernized BSS for the mobile business group, we intend to use it as a single system to efficiently manage our enterprise-wide business operations, including our consumer, enterprise, SMB and wholesale business units.” 

Wan-Li Hsieh, chief information officer, E.SUN Bank
“E.SUN Bank has always been dedicated to improving our services to provide our customers with financial services that meet their needs while offering good customer experience. Through the collaboration with Red Hat to optimize application development processes, including system enhancements and process streamlining, we are able to focus better on developing innovative financial services. The ability to provide fintech services with a warm human touch, will allow E.SUN Bank to continue increasing customer satisfaction and its competitiveness as a technology brand.”