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 India. Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company, IndusInd Bank, ManipalCigna Health Insurance Company Limited and _VOIS 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 India include:

Categories: Digital Transformation and Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Winner: Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company (BALIC)

BALIC is one of the leading private life insurance companies in India. The company has been using a legacy platform as its core system that is built on proprietary technologies. The legacy platform has got many constraints, one of them being its scalability and ability to integrate with other external systems.

To overcome these challenges, BALIC is transforming its core insurance platform using Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat 3Scale API Management, Red Hat Runtimes and Red Hat Directory Server. Comprised of auto-scale capabilities and on-demand resource availability, BALIC’s new core platform shortened the time taken from ideation to deployment of new products and services from six to nine months to less than a month, and helped issue policies in one day inste ad of three or more days. The latest platform also enables BALIC to make its applications available 24/7 and deliver enhanced value-added services to its stakeholders, across its digital touch-points including INSTab, BOING chatbot or i-SERV video-based chat solution that can quickly address customer queries.

Category: Digital Transformation
Winner: IndusInd Bank

IndusInd Bank offers commercial, transactional and electronic banking products and services to both B2C and B2B customers. It believes in driving the business through technology, and aims to consistently add value to its stakeholders and become India’s most convenient bank.

The bank decided to transform its existing IT infrastructure using open source solutions to cope with the increase in payment transactions and customers, gain agility and future-proof growth. It did so by adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Smart Management, Red Hat JBoss Web Server and Red Hat OpenShift with the help of Red Hat Consulting. By running its critical B2C applications -- such as payments engine and mobile banking application -- on the modernized infrastructure, the bank can easily scale those applications on-demand and release new features or patches rapidly. The bank was able to deliver better services, leading to rapid month-on-month growth in transaction velocity and customer activation. Red Hat’s open source solutions provided IndusInd Bank the flexibility to choose the right deployment platform strategy.

Categories: Digital Transformation
Winner: ManipalCigna Health Insurance Company Limited (ManipalCigna)

ManipalCigna offers a full suite of insurance solutions ranging from health, personal accident, major illness, travel and global care to individual customers, employer-employee and non-employer-employee groups to meet their diverse health needs. It is a joint venture between the Manipal Group, an eminent player in the field of healthcare delivery and higher education provider in India, and Cigna Corporation, a global health services company.

previous IT systems limited its growth as they required complex integration to onboard business partners. Its core systems were also not connected to other business systems – such as customer relationship management, loyalty and policy application – which prevented it from having a single view of its customers.

To overcome those challenges, ManipalCigna sought Red Hat Consulting’s help to revamp its IT platforms and applications using Red Hat 3scale API Management, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Decision Manager and Red Hat Fuse. This provides a robust platform that enables applications to elastically scale without manual intervention, which helps improve the performance of its payment systems for policy transactions and respond to market needs faster. Red Hat Fuse also offered enhanced ease of integration with other systems. ManipalCigna shortened the partner onboarding process from 37 days to seven days, allowed exchange of information seamlessly within the organization and with its partners, and gained a 360-degree view of its customers to deliver a unified experience across various channels. Additionally, the company saw API-driven transactions increasing from 20% to 95% as Red Hat 3scale API Management enabled it to easily isolate real business value against enquiries and stop unnecessary traffic to the APIs by monitoring transactions.

Category: Resilience
Winner: _VOIS

_VOIS is a global organization operating in 25 countries from four locations, Egypt, India, Romania and Hungary, made up of more than 24,000 skilled individuals with an ambition to be the Vodafone Group’s partner of choice for talent, technology and transformation.

The company focuses on being people led, digitally enabled and partner powered with a robust strategy to support partners across Vodafone to deliver services across IT, digital, finance, supply chain, business intelligence, analytics and HR operations..

_VOIS started its cloud journey by engaging Red Hat Consulting for a Red Hat container adoption program to learn the best practices for DevOps adoption, including agile, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) and automated testing. It then deployed Red Hat OpenShift as the orchestration and automation layer for its private cloud, which was built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform. To further encourage enterprise-wide DevOps adoption,_VOIS built a Development Environment as-a-service (DevaaS) using Red Hat Cloud Suite, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It also added multiple services to the DevaaS, including Red Hat CodeReady Workspace.

With Red Hat OpenShift, _VOIS accelerated time-to-market by centralizing and standardizing its application development environment and compliance analysis for a consistent multi-cloud experience. This helped it move from a traditional, waterfall approach to iterative DevOps processes and a CI/CD workflow. As a result, it can develop new apps and features faster with 49% and 56% improvement respectively. Project life cycles have also been shortened to weeks instead of three to six months, from inception to delivery. Red Hat OpenShift also helped enhance security and compliance by providing a unified management interface across _VOIS’ infrastructure and built-in Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) capabilities. By establishing an approach for controlling costs and increasing profit margins, _VOIS can reallocate resources to higher-value projects to address new business opportunities faster.

The Digital Transformation category recognizes organizations that have successfully addressed IT challenges and delivered business value to effectively compete as a digital enterprise. 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 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.

Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, senior vice president and general manager, APAC, Red Hat says, “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.”

Goutam Datta, chief information and digital officer, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company said,“We are continuously innovating using technology to provide more convenience and ease to our customers, and at the same time enhance business efficiencies. Our focus is to be agile and future ready to meet the expectations of the evolving business environment and the evolved customer. As our service partner, Red Hat has helped us enhance our IT service delivery and build resilience across the value chain in these unprecedented times. Their solutions have helped us be accessible to our customers 24/7 through our digital touch points and increase customer stickiness through safe and contactless digital offerings.”

“Since the payments industry in India is highly competitive, especially with the rise of disruptive innovators in the market, we need to be able to effectively manage customer stickiness to sustain our growth. Red Hat’s solutions have ensured that our payments and mobile banking platforms are scalable, reliable and can adapt to changes quickly. But more importantly, they have helped foster a culture where our developer and IT teams are working together towards a common goal which is to offer delightful customer experience” says, Ramesh Ganesan, head of Technology and Corporate & Global Market Operations, IndusInd Bank.

Amit Thapliyal, head of Information Technology, PMO and Digital, ManipalCigna Health Insurance Company Limited said, “Red Hat has played a big part in enabling us to achieve our mission of improving the health, well-being and peace of mind of those we serve. By digitally transforming ourselves with Red Hat’s open source solutions, we’re able to onboard partners and track business transactions more efficiently, ensure that our systems are reliable, deliver enhanced customer experience, and speed up our time-to-market. All these capabilities are key to sustaining revenue and customer growth.”

Lastly, to keep pace with the change driven by digital transformation, organizations must be agile and adaptable, and organizational culture is crucial to the success of any digital initiative. Red Hat's hybrid cloud and container-based solutions have helped us embrace open culture and an agile, DevOps-powered approach designed to more flexibly launch and manage services. With Red Hat CodeReady, our developers can now develop and deliver new applications for Kubernetes and collaborate on container-native applications seamlessly. Our new-found agility will enable us to continuously deliver reliable services as we grow.” says Kamlesh Mishra, vice president, Group IT Services, _VOIS.