Announcing the winners of the 14th annual Red Hat Innovation Awards

Now in its 14th year, the Red Hat Innovation Awards recognize the technological achievements of Red Hat customers around the world who demonstrate creative thinking, determined problem-solving and transformative uses of Red Hat technology. This year's winners are Argentine Ministry of Health and Social Development, The BMW Group, Edenor, Ford and Vodafone Idea Limited.

As in years past, a community-wide, online voting process will determine which of these customers will be honored as the 2020 Red Hat Innovator of the Year. Voting is now open and will close at 11:59 p.m. ET on April 22. The winner will be announced on April 29, 2020, during the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. To vote for the 2020 Red Hat Innovator of the Year, visit https://www.redhat.com/en/success-stories/innovation-awards.

Let’s take a closer look at this year’s winners.

Argentine Ministry of Health 

The Ministry of Health (MSAL) is a public entity of Argentina responsible for addressing administrative issues related to health service, as well as enabling the accessibility and the quality of medical attention to the entire society. It needed a scalable health information system for managing the health policies for the more than 45 million residents of Argentina and its implementation of a Universal Health Coverage strategy (UHC). All of this is in an effort to reduce healthcare quality gaps, implement information systems that identify the needs of the population and enable the longitudinal and comprehensive monitoring of patients, and introducing innovative tools for health professionals and patients. MSAL expects to see an increase of roughly 1,200% in the number of transactions that support the exchange of clinical records between organizations by the end of 2020, making a highly scalable and flexible platform a must-have.

The Ministry of Health chose Red Hat OpenShift to provide the foundation for implementing the National Digital Health Network project, an open healthcare concept. Created as a Container Adoption Program aimed at changing the culture, platform and practices required to adopt a DevOps container management strategy, it deployed Red Hat Fuse, Red Hat 3scale API Management, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat Ansible, in collaboration with Red Hat Consulting and Training. With its National Digital Health Network project, MSAL made a significant social impact, driving equal access to information and services and Improved patient safety, deeper insight into national health indicators, and faster infrastructure services velocity with its cloud. 

Read Argentine Ministry of Health's full Red Hat success story.

The BMW Group and DXC Technology

Headquartered in Germany, the BMW Group, including car brands BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce, is the world market leader in premium automobiles. In this fiercely competitive industry, automated driving represents the next wave of innovation. To verify safety testing requirements for automated vehicles, the BMW Group uses real-world data to validate driving simulations and develop driving algorithms. DXC Technology created its managed container Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution, DXC Robotic Drive, based on RHEL, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Openshift Container Storage. 

The new solution, the  High-Performance Data-Driven Development (D3) Platform,  has now accelerated development efforts with faster, more accurate simulation and analytics. In addition, developer productivity increased significantly with enhanced simulation capabilities.

Read the BMW Group's full Red Hat success story.

Edenor

Edenor is the largest electricity distribution company in Argentina and provides power for approximately 8.5 million people in Buenos Aires. It faced a variety of challenges in meeting customer needs including complex interface development and maintenance, lack of skilled talent in the market with knowledge of the existing platform, and incompatibility with more modern and lighter standards, which leads to ad-hoc developments. Edenor sought to simplify connections between different, often distributed, software applications, services, APIs, data or devices; and improve process efficiency providing the right information to the right application at the right time.

To meet its needs, Edenor deployed Red Hat Middleware products including, Red Hat Integration on OpenShift to connect internal and external applications, with Red Hat AMQ, in collaboration with Red Hat Consulting and Training. The project optimized the existing architecture by creating a platform that enables services to be deployed both on-premises and on cloud platforms. With its Red Hat-based platform, Edenor can get more accurate assignments to its field maintenance teams, speeding customer issue resolution and giving customers more reliable, real-time information. Edenor has also seen higher efficiency and a reduction of bugs and fixes in production, helping to provide the reliability Edenor’s customers count on it to provide.

Read Edenor's full Red Hat success story.

Ford Motor Company and Sysdig

Ford Motor Company is a global company based in Dearborn, Michigan that designs, manufactures, markets and services a full line of cars, trucks, SUVs and electrified vehicles, and provides financial services through Ford Motor Credit Company. At Ford, technology has been key to producing and delivering vehicles for decades. It set out to improve the speed of delivery for its stateful applications and better support CI/CD development that needed data persistence. Ford looked for partners that could deliver a multi-tenant solution at scale that offered the security features it needed and selected Red Hat and Sysdig, a cloud-native visibility and security company that has achieved Red Hat OpenShift Operator Certification. Ford built new Red Hat OpenShift clusters, gaining competences in OpenShift, subsequently migrating its stateful applications onto the new platform. 

Ford has seen the impact of its new OpenShift-based platform across its end users, including the company’s developers, who experience simplified writing and provisioning apps on containers, and dealers and plant operators who have gained access to new features, fixes, and updates faster through Ford’s multi-tenant OpenShift environment. Ultimately, Ford’s OpenShift-based hybrid cloud environment supports its revenue-generating products by enabling business operations across plants and dealerships which are key to production and delivery. 

Read Ford's full Red Hat success story.

Vodafone Idea Limited

Vodafone Idea Limited (VIL) is India’s leading telecom operator. Its pan-India telecom operations cover more than 1 billion people and reach more than 700 districts in India, providing world-class connectivity to more than 300 million mobile customers and leading enterprise clients. It led one of the world's largest telco network integration efforts bringing together two large Indian networks, spanning 180,000 radio towers, network deduplication network at 90,000 sites and almost doubled the population under coverage for the two erstwhile brands. Now, VIL has been cited as the fastest 4G network across large parts of India. 

VIL set a vision to build ‘VIL Universal Cloud’ to host complex network and IT workloads on a shared cloud, based on open systems and standards. This model would establish new economics and fuel a paradigm shift of distributing complex centralized network workloads, placing them near customers and delivering unprecedented experience gains. VIL’s journey to adapt VIL Universal Cloud was arduous but ultimately rewarding, as the platform needed to host throughput-intensive, latency-stringent, networking-complex and highly-available network applications. Ecosystem players came together to drive innovations like SRIOV, VNF-M and VXLAN to make this feasible. Consistent to its “Open systems – Open standards” vision, VIL chose Red Hat OpenStack Platform, which proved to be the most agile, versatile, collaborative and innovative collaboration over time. 

VIL achieved 85% cost reduction, and shorter deployment times from months to weeks to days, widely distributed locations running massive commercial traffic (more than 80 VIL Universal Cloud locations, serving more than 30 million VOLTE subscribers and data traffic upwards of 5 terabits per second). VIL’s next priority is to rapidly expand this ‘network-as-a-platform’, enable a hybrid environment, help third-party applications run distributed workloads and self-orchestrate network slices using standard APIs.