Red Hat names ANZ winners at APAC innovation awards

Red Hat has recognised Auckland Transport, Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG) and Westpac New Zealand as the Australia and New Zealand winners of its APAC Innovation Awards 2026, honouring open source-driven modernisation across transport, national security and financial services.

The awards span six categories - Digital Transformation, Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud-Native Development, Automation, Virtualisation and AI - and this year recognised 32 winners across 13 countries in the Asia Pacific region.

Auckland Transport took out the Cloud-Native Development and Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure categories for building Theia, an in-house computer vision platform that monitors its network of CCTV cameras across Auckland.

The transport authority moved away from third-party legacy systems to a cloud-native architecture built on Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, enabling real-time traffic monitoring and automated incident detection. The platform has since expanded across rail, ferry and parking operations.

DSTG, part of the Australian Government's Department of Defence, won in the Virtualisation and Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure categories.

Ahead of a Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance code collaboration exercise, DSTG's Cyber Integration team used Red Hat OpenShift to build a secure research environment supporting virtual machines, containers and future AI workloads within a defence-accredited setting. The new approach cut environment build time from 14 weeks to two and doubled the number of research sprints completed per hackathon cycle from six to 12.

The platform is now a blueprint for similar collaboration environments across the group.

Westpac New Zealand was recognised in the Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Automation categories for its Core Infrastructure Initiative, which insourced and modernised the bank's core application platform to reduce vendor dependence and address regulatory risk.

Standardising on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Satellite, the bank automated critical lifecycle processes including patching and provisioning, decommissioned obsolete nodes, and redirected engineering capacity toward higher-value work.

Westpac New Zealand serves more than 1.5 million customers across retail, agribusiness, corporate and institutional banking.

"“Enterprise technology is becoming more complex than ever, but success is no longer about how many new technologies an organisation adopts. What matters more is how effectively these solutions work together to address real business challenges and deliver tangible value," said Daniel Aw, vice president and general manager for APAC at Red Hat.

"This year's winners demonstrate that the organisations best positioned for long-term success are those building open, flexible foundations that allow them to innovate on their own terms."