Red Hat EMEA Digital Leaders Awards 2021: And the regional winners are...

In our previous post we shared the names of the winners of Red Hat EMEA Digital Leaders Awards across three categories: Open Transformation, Cloud Native, and Hybrid Cloud.

The awards were launched in July 2021 in collaboration with Intel and IDC with the goal of identifying innovative and transformative digital leaders using Red Hat technologies and services. The awards shine a spotlight on the innovations of our customers, while focusing on the business value and impact of their projects.

Philip Carter, group vice president, European chief analyst and WW C-Suite tech research lead at IDC said: “With close to 120 applications, we were able to capture and showcase unique use cases of technology and share some of the best practices for making projects a success. 

We had the pleasure of reviewing many successful practices across industries in EMEA, from large blue chip organisations to local heroes, all of whom provided incredible insights into their projects and operations.” 

Judges were looking for projects with several qualities:

• Impact: providing measurable and clear benefits. 

• Approach: providing a mature and well thought-through approach to strategy, planning, implementation and good management of partners and stakeholders.

• Transferability: providing results and learnings relevant to the rest of the organisation and other organisations.

The work of our regional winners covers the United Kingdom, DACH, Spain, Italy and CEMEA. Here are their stories:

United Kingdom: DWP Digital

DWP Digital is the organisation responsible for digital transformation of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). As the UK’s biggest public service department, DWP is responsible for administering the State Pension and a range of working age, disability and ill health benefits to around 20 million people. 

Citizens have a higher reliance on IT than ever and there is greater demand to share information across a range of government departments to ensure a more joined up experience. Taking a holistic approach that addressed the people, process and technology, DWP Digital’s Integration Team has helped drive a complete culture change within DWP. The Integration team is one of 28 Product Development Units (PDU) in DWP Digital. 

By reusing services through standard APIs to drive automation using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Consulting, the organisation now has consistent collaboration across the PDUs. Teams share and provide information in a much more seamless and collaborative manner. There has been a shift in culture within DWP Digital, and the team’s impact has been nothing short of transformational.

DACH: Audi AG

Delivering more than 1.6 million cars to over 100 countries worldwide in 2020, Audi AG is one of the most successful manufacturers of premium cars and motorbikes. Audi IT is a central partner for all business divisions within the Audi Group and a major driver of the digital transformation in the entire company. It provides support along the entire development process of intelligent, reliable, and secure IT solutions.

With Red Hat OpenShift, an enterprise Kubernetes platform, Audi IT fully automated its workload provisioning system and gained the ability to move between cloud platforms as needed, without being bound by the operating dependencies of a native system. Audi IT created a stable, scalable environment for innovative development across cloud platforms and the group’s many brands including Audi, Ducati and Lamborghini. 

Both experienced developers and those new to Kubernetes can work more efficiently to create, deliver and migrate innovative solutions across on-premise and cloud environments. Audi’s teams can now use the modular, responsive container infrastructure and robust automation technology included in Red Hat OpenShift to scale horizontally with close to zero limitations. Now, the company’s developers can provision new project environments faster to build, deliver, and scale diagnostics, data management, emissions and other innovative projects.

Spain: Junta de Andalucía

Andalucia is the most populous autonomous community in Spain. With approximately 8.5 million inhabitants, its regional government, the Junta de Andalucía, has begun a strategic initiative to bring public administration services closer to citizens, creating the new Web Portal of the Junta de Andalucía, which includes the organic websites of the ministries (government departments), public sector entities integrated in the new model of digital services, a new transparency section and other services widely used by the Andalusian population. 

The new web portal offers citizens a more accessible experience, adapted to mobile phones, while significantly improving its performance compared to the previous system, reducing response times to the point of having a positive impact on the user experience. One of the objectives of this new public portal is to simplify, streamline and improve the services provided to the region's citizens and to provide a single point of contact for them to find all public information and access to services and procedures.

At the core of the project is a new technological infrastructure, and a set of standards and guidelines that lay the foundations for providing better digital services to citizens and managing online presence in a more effective and consistent way. For the public administration, the main improvements are greater sustainability, scalability and improved security, public data governance and extensibility of digital public services.

The Junta de Andalucía Portal is deployed on Red Hat OpenShift, making use of software components deployed in containers and orchestrated by Kubernetes, in a hybrid infrastructure with scalability to the public cloud for specific microservices and cloud-native applications. The new platform provides the Junta de Andalucía with the flexibility and scalability to meet current and future needs and functionalities. After the release of the new Portal of the Junta de Andalucía, the transformation of different digital public services provided by the Junta de Andalucía will be gradually addressed.

Italy: Intesa Sanpaolo

Digitization and customer demands are fast changing the landscape of Italy’s banking sector, with disruptive new entrants winning market share. This trend means traditional financial institutions must become more agile. Today, accelerated digitization for both consumers and business customers is driving Italian banks to move to the cloud. 

As a strategic choice, Intesa Sanpaolo wanted to adopt cloud technology to extend the current on-premise infrastructure. As a leading Italian Banking Group, the most critical IT challenge was applying coherent management processes in the whole hybrid model. Taking advantage of Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies, in conjunction with Red Hat Consulting, the bank abstracted an automated model to manage the infrastructure independently with an increase in governance at the same time.

This project's unique innovation is delivering a unified model for managing application delivery, workloads, and infrastructure in a heterogeneous environment that spans more than 4,300 branches across the country, serving more than 13.5 million customers.

CEMEA: Riyad Bank

Riyad Bank’s digital transformation journey to speed up innovation and time-to-market is underpinned by a hybrid cloud strategy built on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. The key mission was to balance the move to new cloud platforms and technologies whilst leveraging existing investments in infrastructure, applications, processes and policies.

Adopting “self-managing” or automated infrastructure enabled teams to spend more time on continuous improvement initiatives such as innovation, digital enablement of its global customer base, machine learning and AI; and less time on legacy issues and challenges.

The focus on long term strategic digital objectives meant that the bank is delivering direct business benefits such as growth and revenue, increased agility, and enhanced customer experiences. All whilst delivering IT efficiencies such as reduced capital and operational expenses, improved security, faster self-service capabilities and improved productivity.