Tata Motors Limited, Bharti Airtel Limited, and RBL Bank Announced as Winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2021 for India

New Delhi – October 21, 2021 —

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2021 for India. Tata Motors Limited, Bharti Airtel Limited, and RBL Bank were honored at the Red Hat APAC Forum Virtual Experience today for their digital transformation journey and innovations using Red Hat solutions.

Open source continues to be an innovation engine for Asia Pacific enterprises by helping them modernize infrastructures, develop applications and transform digitally. According to Red Hat’s recent State of Enterprise Open Source report, 92 percent of the region’s IT leaders are using enterprise open source today, exceeding the global average of 90 percent.

With the theme of “Open Your Perspective,” the Red Hat APAC Forum Virtual Experience encourages organizations to build resilience, achieve their transformation goals and propel their business forward with open source. This year, the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards recognized the technological achievements of 24 organizations in the region for their creative thinking, determined problem solving and innovative use of Red Hat solutions.

The winners were selected based on the impact of their Red Hat deployments to support business goals and company culture, industry, communities, as well as the uniqueness of vision for the project. They displayed how open source tools and culture have helped them to improve productivity, agility and cost savings while empowering them to address future challenges and emerging trends more confidently and effectively.

Winners were recognized in five categories: digital transformation, hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud-native development, automation and resilience.

Category: Digital Transformation
Winner: Tata Motors Limited (Tata Motors)

Tata Motors Limited is a leading global automobile manufacturer of cars, utility vehicles, pick-ups, trucks and buses. Part of the USD 113 billion Tata Group, Tata Motors is the largest and only OEM in India offering an extensive range of integrated, smart and e–mobility solutions. It has operations in India, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Thailand, South Africa and Indonesia through a strong global network of 103 subsidiaries, 10 associate companies, three joint ventures with Tata MarcoPolo Motors Limited, Tata Hitachi Construction Machinery and Fiat Tata, and two joint operations as of March 31, 2020.

Tata Motors realized its System of records (SoR) could not keep up with its growing expectations of digital solutions. Tata Motors needed to develop an API-centric agile integration platform to interface with SoR in order to streamline the onboarding process of dealers, partners and mobility aggregators, create better services and improve revenues. The automobile manufacturer laid a foundation for improved processes and agile delivery of new services using Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat 3scale API Management, Red Hat Fuse, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat AMQ. The automobile manufacturer is now able to provide APIs for its various digital applications for easier integration. Red Hat’s hybrid architecture support also offers Tata Motors the flexibility of moving into the cloud with public cloud providers such as Microsoft or AWS.

Since using the platform, Tata Motors streamlined integration efforts and enabled more use cases to support changing business needs and market conditions. In the next phase, Tata Motors hopes to extend the platform to their connected manufacturing project for Internet of Things (IoT) use cases.

Category: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Winner: Bharti Airtel Limited (Airtel)

Headquartered in India, Airtel is a leading provider of telecommunications services with over 474 million customers in 18 countries across Asia and Africa. The company ranks amongst the top three mobile operators globally and its network covers over two billion people. Airtel is India’s largest integrated communications solutions provider and the second largest mobile operator in Africa. Airtel’s retail portfolio includes high speed 4G/4.5G mobile broadband, Airtel Xstream Fiber that provides speeds up to 1 Gbps with convergence across linear and on-demand entertainment, streaming services spanning music and video, digital payments and financial services. For enterprise customers, Airtel offers a wide range of solutions that include more secure connectivity, cloud and data centre services, cyber security features, IoT, advertising technology and cloud based communication.

The Indian telecommunications industry continues to be highly competitive. As of March 2021, there were approximately 1.2 billion subscribers in the country, making it the world’s second largest telecommunications market. Subscribers also consume huge amounts of data. The country’s total wireless data usage grew 1.82 percent quarterly to reach 25,227 PB in the third quarter of 2021.To position itself to grow and thrive amid these developments, Airtel transformed its IT architecture with Red Hat.

The telco used Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Smart Management and Red Hat Ceph Storage to take an open hybrid cloud approach, optimize Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and accelerate innovation. With an open cloud architecture, Airtel has reduced cloud implementation time from four weeks to one week, allowing it to expand its core network more quickly to meet increasing mobile demands and launch new digital services like 5G, gaming and remote media production. With Red Hat, Airtel plans to further automate its business processes to enhance business agility and bring more innovative telco services to life.

Category: Digital Transformation and Cloud-native Development
Winner: RBL Bank

RBL Bank is one of India’s leading private sector banks with an expanding presence across the country. The bank offers specialized services under five business verticals: corporate and institutional banking, commercial banking, branch and business banking, retail assets and treasury and financial markets operations.

As India’s banking industry becomes more digital, RBL Bank needed to accelerate its launch of new business functionalities to match disruptive competitors, including other local banks and fintech firms. Hence, the bank sought to change its underlying platforms to innovate and roll out new digital services faster. In 2020, RBL Bank was the first bank in the world to start to move its Finacle core banking workloads to Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat enables RBL Bank to power its business with a modernized private cloud architecture with highly scalable features. The upgraded digital banking platform, on a cloud-native architecture, can help accelerate innovation as well as drive extensive automation to achieve faster and more effective operations. RBL Bank aims to enhance the automation of its banking processes, leading to faster customer onboarding, more efficient electronic transactions and lower operational costs.

With a platform that makes the business more agile, RBL Bank is more confident in delivering better banking experiences and improving the speed and relevance of IT services to the business.

The Digital Transformation category recognizes organizations that have successfully addressed IT challenges and delivered business value to effectively compete as a digital enterprise. The Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure category showcases a collaborative public, private or open hybrid cloud deployment. The Cloud-Native Development category showcases agile methodologies and organizations that have most successfully illustrated superior overall performance in creating, maintaining and deploying successful business applications.

Supporting Quotes

Marjet Andriesse, vice president and general manager, APAC, Red Hat
“2021 continues to be a year of uncertainty, but Asia Pacific organizations are using open source technology to more rapidly and effectively create more business possibilities with digital transformation. They are using technologies like hybrid cloud, data analytics and edge computing to meet changing market landscapes and enhance customer experiences. Congratulations to this year’s winners, and we hope that Red Hat’s open source solutions will continue to help address the many real challenges our customers face today, and unlock the future for business in Asia Pacific.”

Gopinath Jayaraj, chief information officer, Tata Motors

“We are delighted to have won the Red Hat Innovation Award and be highly commended for our digital transformations. It is a fantastic achievement to be not simply awarded but equally voted for by our happy customers. At TML, we have been successfully driving digital transformation with an evolutionary architecture approach. Today, creating a responsive, scalable, business-centric, enterprise-class digital infrastructure is key to success. Red Hat’s suite of open source solutions has been especially useful in enterprise integration and digital scaffolding to support TML’s platforms.“

Randeep Sekhon, chief technology officer, Bharti Airtel

“We are delighted to collaborate with Red Hat to deploy cloud-based solutions and offer a world-class experience to our customers. Working with Red Hat also enables us to further accelerate our innovation engine and be ready for emerging technologies such as 5G.”

Sankarson Banerjee, chief information officer, RBL Bank

“RBL Bank constantly seeks to be a trailblazer and become a positive influence on bringing about change in the banking industry. This collaboration with Red Hat has helped us accelerate our transformative journey by two years. By using Red Hat OpenShift, RBL Bank has the speed and agility to create new services based on the digital preferences of our customers and roll them out quickly.”