AmBank and Social Security Organization Named Winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for Malaysia

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 Malaysia. AmBank (M) Berhad and Social Security Organization 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 recognize 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 the Malaysia include:

Category: Cloud-Native Development
Winner: AmBank (M) Berhad

AmBank Group is a leading financial services group with over 40 years of expertise in supporting the economic development of Malaysia.

To maintain its competitive edge in the saturated digital banking space, AmBank decided to create an end-to-end application to digitally onboard local small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

AmBank engaged Red Hat Open Innovation Labs to learn how to adopt DevOps and agile development processes. After the five-week program, the bank created standard operating procedures for managing upcoming agile application projects. It also used Red Hat OpenShift to build a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for its applications. Since the new app automates some compliance processes such as credit, risk and company checks, it reduces the complexity of the onboarding process, minimizes the number of visits to physical branches and helps prevent churn of SME customers. Red Hat also enabled AmBank to embrace a culture of collaboration across teams, which will help reduce overall defects, requirements mismanagements and coding defects. This ultimately helps improve its speed-to-market and overall business agility.

Category: Digital Transformation
Winner: Social Security Organization (SOCSO)

SOCSO, otherwise known as PERKESO, is one of the government departments under Malaysia’s Ministry of Human Resources. It covers all social security provisions and administration for workers in Malaysia. The PERKESO Social Security Protection is based on the concept of joint responsibility through the pooling of resources, sharing of risk and replacement of income, and it aims to provide social security protection to employees and their dependants through its various schemes.

PERKESO needed to transform its services through rebranding as part of the Pelan Transformasi PERKESO 2017, which supports the organization’s overall Strategic Plan 2016-2020. This called for the organization to modernize its legacy remuneration systems, which consists of modules that are hard-wired with codes and integrated with isolated web services and batch processing scripts. PERKESO deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run its servers, and developed new applications that are modular and integrated with Red Hat Fuse. It also built business processes and workflows with Red Hat Process Automation Manager and deployed them on Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat JBoss Web Server. 

By doing so, PERKESO reduced operational cost, extended the availability of its services and ensured that its services reached more stakeholders (i.e., employers and employees registered with PERKESO). About 400,000 employers can now perform transactions such as contribution submissions and payments via PERKESO’s new digital channels instead of having to visit a physical branch. Meanwhile, employees can access their profiles and contribution-related information in PERKESO’s online systems, enabling them to be a more informed contributor. Additionally, the online channels helped the organization deliver a better user experience and reduce the number of user complaints. They can also accommodate more stakeholders to ensure self-employees, such as taxi drivers and drivers working for e-hailing services, are protected under PERKESO.

The Cloud-Native Development category showcases agile methodologies and organizations that have most successfully illustrate superior overall performance in creating, maintaining and deploying successful business applications. The Digital Transformation category recognizes organizations that have successfully addressed IT challenges and delivered business value to effectively compete as a digital enterprise.

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.”

Datuk Iswaraan Suppiah, group chief operations officer, AmBank Group 
“Red Hat has provided us with the foundational blocks of an enterprise-wide DevOps practice. We have embraced new working practices among our teams with a common goal of launching better and faster digital products to capture a larger market share. We have applied DevOps to build a truly contact-less, fully online digital on boarding solution for small and medium enterprises. We are now more confident of delivering the highest level of service to all our customers, thanks to the capabilities we have gained from Red Hat Open Innovation Labs and solutions.”

Dr Mohammed Azman Aziz Mohammed, chief executive officer, Social Security Organization
“PERKESO’s vision is to be the premier, dynamic and outstanding leader in social security. Red Hat’s solutions have been integral to our transformation strategy, allowing us to scale and improve business agility. With reduced operational costs and improved services, we can introduce and deliver new digital services rapidly, and improve our customer service and reach effectively.”