Red Hat Open Innovation Labs Hosts First Japan Residency With Fukuoka Financial Group

The residency introduced agile development methodology with DevOps and in-house system development to help advance digital transformation efforts

RALEIGH, N.C. -

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Fukuoka Financial Group, Inc. (“FFG”), a banking and financial services company based in Japan, has completed a residency with Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, the first residency completed in Japan. During the residency, the teams worked to improve corporate competitiveness and advance the company’s digital transformation efforts.

As the business landscape continues to shift, new competitors enter the market and customers are looking for more digital service options, FFG is working to keep pace with those changes. Through the residency, it hopes to increase the speed at which it can release new services into the market to meet customer demands. FFG has established a ‘Digital Strategy Division’ and, combined with the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs engagement, is working to accelerate its digital transformation so it is able to more quickly introduce new services to the market amidst competition with fintech service providers. At the heart of its digital services platform is Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

In addition, Open Innovation Labs introduced FFG to agile methodology, including DevOps, to enable them to build out an in-house development system. To this point, FFG had been outsourcing its development of new products and services. Part of this undertaking aimed to help the company increase the skill sets of its employees to be able to bring innovation and development capabilities in-house.

Red Hat Open Innovation Labs enable customers to work collaboratively in a residency-oriented lab environment with Red Hat experts. This consultative experience is designed to help customers jumpstart innovation and software development initiatives using open source technology and DevOps methods either at the physical lab spaces or in a pop-up lab at a customer’s site.

Launched in 2016, Red Hat Open Innovation Labs offers customers an immersive experience offering a dedicated consulting service during a 4-12 week residency that helps companies integrate people, methodology and technology to solve business challenges. Through Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, customers can take advantage of mentoring and technology to help their organization rapidly accelerate business initiatives through technology, whether working on creative new digital applications or modernization initiatives, such as moving a monolithic application to a modern microservices architecture.

Supporting Quotes:

John Allessio, vice president, Global Services, Red Hat

“We are excited to be working with Fukuoka Financial Group on an Open Innovation Labs residency, and are dedicated to enabling their success through Red Hat technology and agile open source culture.”

Hirokazu Mochizuki, president and representative director, Red Hat Japan

“It is our great pleasure that Fukuoka Financial Group selected Red Hat to help advance their digital transformation journey. Red Hat Open Innovation Labs is about taking Red Hat’s open approach and providing it to customers to inspire a new way of working and equipping them to be able to change the way their organizations work. We look forward to seeing how Fukuoka takes the skills learned during the residency and to build out their in-house system development to better serve their customers.”

Koji Yokota, director and executive officer, Fukuoka Financial Group, Inc.

“We have a history about 140 years. The total number of personal accounts and the number of corporate accounts are respectively 5.7 million and 220,000.  In recent years, new players that entered into the financial industry from other industries have exceeded such figures. With conventional waterfall-type development centering on outsourcing, it would take one year to develop systems and half a year to remodel. As a result, we have not been able to catch up with recent competitions. In order to provide new services to customers more quickly and effectively verify them, it is essential to introduce agile development into the company. We believe it will lead to our continuous growth. It is important to learn new methods and practical skills which would enable digital transformation and innovation and establish culture to promote them. We feel that our members have grown thanks to the participation in Open Innovation Labs. We would like Red Hat to continue to support us as a companion to cause the digital transformation together.”

 
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