Red Hat, the First US$1billion Open Source Company, Cements Its Growth
Caption for pic: L-R: Chia Wee Luen, Senior Director & GM for Red Hat ASEAN; Damien Wong, VP & GM, Asia Growth and Emerging Markets (GEMs), Red Hat; Lim Eng Kit, Head of Technology Transformation, Ambank Group; Datuk Iswaraan Suppiah, Group COO, AmBank Group; and far right, Eric Quah, Country Manager of Red Hat Malaysia.
At the recent Red Hat Forum APAC 2018 held in Kuala Lumpur, the 1st of the planned 11-stops in Asia-Pacific, Red Hat unveiled the winners of this year’s Red Hat Innovation Awards APAC 2018 to be Ambank Group and Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU). Inspired by the theme, “Ideas Worth Exploring,” these companies were recognised for their innovative and outstanding use of Red Hat solutions.
Ambank Group won in the Digital Transformation category, whereby the bank is accelerating the next phase of its digital capabilities. As part of its digital journey, it aimed to provide better mobile banking and cash management in a manner that is easy, simple and fast for its valued customers across all touch points.
To help achieve this goal, AmBank Group deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat Gluster Storage with the help of Red Hat Consulting. This allowed AmBank to build up its digital capability with a more agile and scalable application delivery. The effort also enabled the development of new applications and services which expanded its market reach to create new revenue streams.
MAMPU won in the Modern Application Development category, which recognises the organisation’s overall performance in creating, maintaining and deploying successful business applications through the use of agile methodologies.
L-R: Chia Wee Luen, Senior Director & GM for Red Hat ASEAN; Damien Wong, VP & GM, Asia Growth and Emerging Markets (GEMs), Red Hat; Hanissull Jalis Binti Md Yusof, Application Development Division, MAMPU; Susie Dorai Raj, Director, ICT Consulting Division, MAMPU; Adam Muhammad Richard, Application Development Division, MAMPU; and Eric Quah, Country Manager of Red Hat Malaysia.
As the central agency of Malaysia’s Public Service Administration responsible for modernisation and transformation of the public sector and its agencies, MAMPU provides ICT infrastructure and a standardised system. In alignment with the country’s digital transformation initiative, MAMPU deployed Red Hat Cloud Suite, resulting in improved accessibility in system development and increased cost savings in infrastructure and licensing requirements.
The world’s leading provider of open source solutions
No stranger to wowing critics and dramatically shifting corporate philosophy even with the most self-assured tech giants, the likes of Cisco and Microsoft, receiving awards of recognition from Red Hat, is something to be lauded for. After all, Red Hat’s open source technology is proven.
“Since 25 years ago when we first started in 1993, long before the likes of Tesla, AirBnb and Uber, Red Hat had become an icon for a very disruptive model that impacted industries by being one of the earliest champions for open source software,” said Damien Wong, Red Hat’s VP & GM, Asia Growth and Emerging Markets (GEMs), as he brought up a slide carrying quotes indicating the philosophical shift from proprietary software to the wide acceptance of open source software today.
“Cisco used to say that open source was non-sustainable. Microsoft used to say open source was a cancer, but now look at our evidence,” he continued. “If you think about it, this is very ironic, because first, they laughed at you. Then they fight you but eventually, we prevailed and now we are altogether very happy to be part of that revolution.”
| “Many may know Cisco as a networking company…. But over the past several years, software, services, and security have become a key part of our strategy.”
– Lew Tucker, Cisco VP/CTO –
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“Microsoft has heritage here. We were a developer tools company first and now, of course, WE ARE ALL ON OPEN SOURCE.”
– Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft – |
“Traditional organisations tend to plan, prescribe and execute but that is good only if you know what will happen 5 years or 10 years down the line. But we all know, looking at Kodak, Nokia, Toys R Us, General Electric (in fact, this year, GE was dropped from the Dow Jones Index after more than a hundred years), etc. – it is a clear sign that the traditional way has to change. Open organisations engage employees in a very collaborative culture and empower them to come up with the best decisions on behalf of the company, instead of top-down executions.”
“About 2 years ago, our CEO Jim Whitehurst, wrote a bestselling book for Harvard Business Press, called “The Open Organization” about the attributes of an open organisation which include the key principles of inclusiveness, meritocracy and decisions invariably being made with the power of the entire organisation. Today, no one asks if digital disruptions happen anymore. The question is no more ‘do I react?’ but ‘how do I react?’. If you look at open source from the tech perspective, it is clearly the way to go, for the company’s architecture has to be flexible, adaptable and future-proof,” Wong explained.
During the media presentation, ST Telemedia Connect (SST Connect, a 100% owned investment of Temasek that invests in the communications, media and technology space primarily in Asia), was also on hand to extol the virtues of open source. STT Connect became the first cloud company in Singapore to achieve the highest level Multi-Tier Cloud Security (MTCS) certification with an OpenStack private cloud, a stripe earned by partnering with Red Hat.
Red Hat also used this opportunity to introduce Eric Quah, the new Country Manager of Red Hat Malaysia, to the media. When asked what he sees as Red Hat’s positioning coming in at this pivotal time in the Malaysian political and competitive landscape, Quah deftly answered that all the more, government-linked companies and enterprises would want to renegotiate existing technology contracts and consider open sourced solutions as they move to stay agile and not locked-in.
L-R: David Robinson, CTO of STT Connect; Eric Quah, Country Manager of Red Hat Malaysia; Damien Wong, VP & GM, Asia Growth and Emerging Markets (GEMs), Red Hat; Deddy Johari, MD, iZeno Indonesia; and Nicholas Lim, Regional Sales Director, iZeno.
One can safely conclude that this billion-dollar veteran will continue to make great strides towards “liberating resources for growth” (to borrow the term from Red Hat’s website) in the digital transformation of Malaysia, APAC and the world.