Red Hat to Cement Growth of Open Innovation in the Region

The 2017 Red Hat Forum media briefing session, held recently in Kuala Lumpur, was themed “The Impact of the Individual”. This forum continued the discussion that started at Red Hat Summit 2017, casting a spotlight on individuals who are looking towards the future, who are willing to step up, try something new and make change happen. These individuals can create significant advancements in their respective fields, from healthcare and infrastructure to finance, government and more.

The forum also served to recognise and celebrate local customer success stories of outstanding integration and innovative usage of Red Hat’s open source solutions through the Red Hat innovation Awards (APAC). In line with this, Red Hat named Suruhanjaya Syarikat Malaysia (SSM) as its 2017 winner in Malaysia.

SSM recently embarked on a journey of developing a new and advanced gateway for the registration of companies and businesses in Malaysia. SSM now uses Red Hat’s Middleware solution, Red Hat JBoss Fuse, to simplify and speed up the registration process by reducing manual registration handling with an automated online system. SSM is now better positioned to meet current and future integration needs, and reduce manual touch points, automate processes and connect assets for improved efficiency.

L-R: Damien Wong, VP & GM of Red Hat ASEAN; Farid Ahmad, Director of Marketing & Business Development, SSM; and Chew Kai Peng, Country Manager, Red Hat Malaysia

As rapid application development is a necessity now, open source is increasingly being seen as a default choice for organizations in Malaysia and the region.

Speaking at the 2017 Red Hat Forum media briefing here, Damien Wong, Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat ASEAN, said that open source solutions shape and empower an environment for participation and innovation. The open source way is a “try, learn and modify” system. Businesses that have learned to build such a structure and culture for individuals to collaborate, learn together and march forward are those that succeed in today’s ever evolving landscape.

Just a week ago, Red Hat announced the launch of its 1^st Red Hat Open Innovation Labs (“Lab”) in the APAC region, in Singapore. This would be the 3^rd physical Lab, with the first two in Boston and London. Red Hat is also ready to deploy “pop-up” Labs at customer sites.

These Labs provide residency-oriented lab environment with immersive experiences, that can last anywhere from one to three months. Through hands-on instruction, teams can collaborate there and experiment with agile development methodologies, DevOps practices, and get immediate experience with the open principles and open culture that underlie many open source communities. Customers can use microservices, deploy them in containers and deliver them using DevOps methodologies across physical, cloud and mobile environments to more quickly scale-up or down on-demand.

Damien Wong, VP & GM of Red Hat ASEAN

“Open source software, is less vulnerable, and more highly secured, in most cases, when compared to closed source, or proprietary software. Why? I’m going to ask you back…. would you rather the vendor ship you a “black box” product which no one else has access to its code or to have a product where the open source community, people from different organisations, have had the ability to completely scrutinise it? And e.g is Linux, which is not a place where cowboys can go in and just change anything, instead it’s a highly governed framework and not any change can be pushed through without the community agreeing that it won’t be a risk to its organisation,” asserted Wong, when asked if open source is more vulnerable, security-wise.

Wong further shared that though every organization has its own unique set of needs and obstacles when it comes to their digital transformation journey, Red Hat has noted three common challenges amongst its customers across numerous industries.

The challenges that have been identified are:

• determining a cloud strategy that complements the business;
• building and delivering new applications faster; and
• utilising the technology that is currently in place whilst bringing it up to speed to meet the overall business needs.

Massimo Ferrari, Management Strategy Director of Red Hat Global, was also on hand to introduce the Management Strategy & Business division, a relatively  new division within the Red Hat family.

Massimo Ferrari, Management Strategy Director of Red Hat Global expounding on Red Hat’s portfolio of products and how they address common management deployment problems

A shout-out goes to “home-grown hero”, Grab, which took on Red Hat Ansible Tower solution. This allowed Grab to scale up from a small startup into serving millions of user in a short period of time. Downtime is now reduced by 40%.

That the Red Hat Forum covers fourteen cities, with global executives each scheduled to attend select dates and deliver keynotes, show how this esteemed open source player is bent on cementing its position in the region by convincing potential customers to transform through accelerated innovation as promised by its suite of products.