Red Hat announces APAC Innovation Award winners at Sydney Summit

Red Hat has announced Tambla Workforce Solutions and Suncorp Group as the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2022 for the ANZ region.

Tambla Workforce Solutions won the Digital Transformation and Automation award category. It turned to Red Hat premier partner Sydney-based MSP Advent One to optimise its data processing-intensive payroll services after inheriting an ageing slow platform through a business acquisition.

This led to the deployment of a solution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Satellite, over four weeks in 2021. The new solution delivered improved security functionality and availability of critical services.

Tambla chief information security officer Richard Mitton told CRN that Advent One’s deployment of Red Hat software helped Tambla to achieve its goals in a short period of time while reducing costs and reducing risks.

“The time it was estimated was going to be about $60,000-$70,000 a month in that one public cloud. We ended up getting the cost to the below $10,000 a month and we doubled the amount of resources on our board and the different services we deployed to increase the performance,” Mitton said.

Mitton said that migrating Tambla’s systems to a modern enterprise platform with automation and management from Red Hat improved how the company works and allowed greater focus on the delivery of critical services.

“A lot of our customers, including government organisations, operate in highly controlled work environments where processing payroll on time is critical to the business and cannot be compromised,” he said.

Advent One chief technical officer Talor Holloway said, “Our role as a partner is to accelerate these projects ultimately. One of the benefits of what we'll do with Red Hat is we use it extensively and it allows us to take a packaged up modular automation and use it to accelerate customers projects”.

The other APAC Innovation Award winner in the category of Digital Transformation and Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure was financial services company Suncorp Group.

Suncorp Group executive general manager of infrastructure, technology and transformation Charles Pizzato said, “Red Hat OpenShift enables Suncorp’s developers the ability to deliver software more rapidly, in a secure and standardised environment, that is highly portable, giving us flexibility in the future.”

Pizzato told CRN, “Firstly, we use it to speed up the average handling time for a call by being able to automate the identification and verification process which is important security for our customer. Secondly, we can allow agents to be able to take analytics from the call to be able to suggest things the customer may want in real time for the next best action.”

Red Hat senior vice president and general manager APJC Marjet Andriesse said, “Our winners have showcased exceptional agility and innovation when it comes to using technologies like hybrid cloud, data analytics and edge computing for their business and customers.”

Red Hat senior director and head of technology, ANZ Fytos Charalambides said, “Looking forward and of recent news we've recently made available on the cloud service marketplaces our technology OpenShift and also Ansible, and that's in response to customer usage and demand.”

“Second to that we've had our OpenShift platform available as a cloud service available to be consumed using cloud consoles or your accounts through cloud providers. That is a jointly engineered solution available on the Microsoft Azure Cloud and also AWS, and then it's jointly managed by AWS, Microsoft, Red Hat. We've forged a very strong partnership with those cloud providers.”

Red Hat vice president, partner ecosystem, APAC Andrew Habgood said a continued focus for the company involves “investing in the ecosystem in an open collaborative way, using the open-source principles. We're not just a software vendor, we're partnering with the ecosystem to help them build solutions with open source with our technologies and solve customer outcomes.”