FWD Insurance and HKT Crowned Winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2019 in Hong Kong

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HONG KONG, CHINA
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December 18, 2019
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Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the 2019 Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards for Hong Kong. FWD Insurance and HKT were recognized at Red Hat Executive Exchange in Hong Kong today for their outstanding and innovative usage of Red Hat solutions.

Open source has the power to not only improve IT systems but also transform how we interact and solve problems collectively.

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

Although most companies recognize the importance of digital transformation, the journey is not easy. According to the Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook 2019, 86% of organizations have started or are planning to embark on their digital transformation journey soon. However, a quarter of them are still developing their digital transformation strategy.

The Red Hat Executive Exchange aims to inspire organizations to overcome common transformation challenges and sustain digital leadership by adopting open source technologies and practices. One way of doing so is by honoring organizations that have demonstrated creative thinking, determined problem-solving and transformative uses of Red Hat technology through the 2019 Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards.

The winners were selected based on the impact of their Red Hat deployments on their business, industry and the community. They showcased how open source tools and culture were key to achieving efficiency, productivity, and agility – all of which can enable continuous innovation and help them create a flexible foundation that can meet an organization’s needs today and well into the future.

Category: Modern application development, Agile integration

Winner: FWD Insurance

FWD Insurance is the insurance arm of investment group Pacific Century Group. It offers various types of insurance products to customers in Hong Kong and Macau, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

With the aim of making insurance easy for consumers, FWD Insurance decided to adopt DevOps to gain the ability to quickly develop applications that could deliver better customer experiences. It therefore turned to Red Hat Consulting to deploy Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes (RHOAR), Red Hat Fuse, Red Hat Quay, Red Hat Smart Management, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This move helped reduce time-to-market, with FWD Insurance now taking only three months to move applications from development to production. It also enabled the company to containerize some of its existing applications to deliver enhanced services such as instant underwriting and claims services.

In addition, Red Hat solutions enabled FWD Insurance to partner with other businesses and expand its distribution channels using Open APIs and agile integration. For instance, consumers can now purchase FWD Insurance’s products through its partner’s ecommerce platform.

Categories: Modern application development

Winner: HKT

HKT is Hong Kong’s premier telecommunications service provider and leading operator in fixed-line, broadband, and mobile communication services. It is a subsidiary of PCCW Limited, a global company headquartered in Hong Kong which holds interest in telecommunications, media, IT solutions, property development and investment, and other businesses.

To build on its traditional telecommunications business and to offer customers more comprehensive services, HKT has expanded service offerings beyond its core business to sustain continuing growth. With the help of Red Hat Consulting, HKT implemented Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Integration to adopt an agile continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) approach to development. This enabled it to launch travel, insurance and ecommerce services within months, and flexibly enhance those services or introduce new offerings to address changing consumer demands four times faster than before. Additionally, the automatic scaling in Red Hat OpenShift enabled HKT to handle spikes in traffic relating to seasonal and promotional offers cost-effectively, which also helps deliver a good customer experience.

The Modern Application Development category honors organizations that have most successfully illustrated superior overall performance in creating, maintaining, and deploying successful business applications by using agile methodologies. Meanwhile, the Agile Integration category showcases the project that best represents the value of agile integration.

Supporting Quotes

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

“Open source has the power to not only improve IT systems but also transform how we interact and solve problems collectively. It is heartening to see so many organizations using open source to gain exceptional transformation capabilities. Congratulations to this year’s winners; we hope that they will serve as an inspiration and catalyst to other businesses in Asia Pacific to achieve the same feat and thrive in the digital age.”

Amy Hoe, chief technology and operation officer, FWD Group

“FWD Group’s transformation journey is driven by its vision of becoming a leading pan-Asian insurer that changes the way people feel about insurance. Red Hat’s open source solutions are helping us to realize that by enabling us to develop and deploy new applications faster though DevOps. We can offer customers easier and faster access to our solutions too as the open architecture enables us to easily integrate our services into our partners’ platform. With these new capabilities, we are now more confident of sustaining business growth through new revenue streams and the delivery of good customer experience.”

Kenneth Wong, head of Business Technology, HKT

“We have decided to venture into new sectors and diversify our revenue streams to enhance competitiveness. Red Hat has been instrumental in helping us do so by providing an agile, scalable, and easy-to-use development environment. With Red Hat OpenShift, we have shortened our time-to-market from four weeks to one week, and ensure optimal scalability to cope with changing transaction volumes. Both these capabilities empower us to quickly enhance our existing applications and break into new markets to respond to changing consumer demands more effectively.”

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