Announcing the winners of the 18th annual Red Hat Innovation Awards

Since 2006, Red Hat has used the Red Hat Innovation Awards to recognize the technological achievements of Red Hat customers around the world who demonstrate creative problem-solving to make a positive impact on the business world and society. This year’s winners are Banco da Amazonia, Eusko Jaularitzaren Informatika Elkartea (EJIE), Informationstechnikzentrum Bund (Capgemini) and Transpower New Zealand.

A community-wide, online voting process will determine which customer is distinguished as the 2024 Red Hat Innovator of the Year. Voting is now open and will close at 9 a.m. ET on May 2nd. The winner will be announced on May 7, 2024, during Red Hat Summit. To vote for the 2024 Red Hat Innovator of the Year, visit www.redhat.com/en/success-stories/innovation-awards.

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

Banco da Amazonia

Banco da Amazônia S.A. is an Open Capital Society (traded in BM&FBOVESPA under the ticker BAZA3), controlled by the Brazilian federal government (95% of the shares). The bank is responsible for the management and operations of the Constitutional Fund for the North Region Development and Financing in the Amazon region, which accounts for more than half of Brazil’s territorial area. With Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, BASA Digital drastically simplified the credit approval process, allowing it to be automatic, agile and accessible to rural producers in difficult-to-access areas.

This reduced processing time from 180 days to 24 hours, enabling better access to financial services for Banco da Amazonia Credit Agents and customers and fostering social inclusion and regional development. BASA Digital saw a 370.4% increase in contracted funds, benefiting rural producers. Red Hat's technology played a vital role in this transformation by enhancing security, reliability, and innovation. Banco da Amazônia S.A. now plans to expand BASA Digital projects to areas such as green energy and reforestation, and support even more investment in the Amazon region following the United Nations’ COP30 conference in BASA Digital’s home city, Belém. It also plans to extend its deployment of Red Hat products to bring all legacy platforms into containerized environments and build a strong foundation to move to the cloud.

Read Banco da Amazonia’s full Red Hat success story.

Eusko Jaurlaritzaren Informatika Elkartea (EJIE)

EJIE, responsible for the digitalization of public services in the Basque Country, was tasked with creating language tools for the Basque language and chose Red Hat hybrid cloud technologies to develop an IT infrastructure with increased computing capacity, portability and scalability. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a more flexible and reliable operating system foundation for the translator, while Red Hat OpenShift delivered many of the necessary capabilities to power the AI lifecycle, including support for containers with graphics processing units (GPUs). EJIE has been able to promote the DevOps methodology by providing development teams with autonomy and tools to integrate with production teams, resulting in a product-oriented approach rather than a project-oriented one.

After establishing the technological architecture, EJIE engaged with Vicomtech, part of the Basque Network of Science, Technology and Innovation (RVCTI), to optimize the learning algorithm and develop a Rest API to interact with different applications. Since its launch in 2019, the Itzuli application for mobile phones has helped citizens translate Basque to and from Spanish, French and English. Itzuli has reported more than 100,000 downloads and is used by more than 30,000 users daily, with peaks of more than 260,000 queries in a single day.

With Red Hat OpenShift, which is deployed in the Basque Government's own IT infrastructure, EJIE was able to enhance its AI capabilities and is now working on a pilot project to create automatic transcriptions of judicial processes with Itzuli. The neural networks are being trained with recordings of Basque public television (EITB) and the proceedings of 12 different judicial bodies.

Read EJIE’s full Red Hat success story.

Informationstechnikzentrum Bund (Capgemini)

Capgemini, a global business and technology transformation partner, together with the German Federal Government’s Federal Information Technology Center (ITZBund), initiated a project to automate the deployment of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platforms in an air-gapped environment, meeting strict security standards. The goal is to streamline software development for digitizing government services. The use of Red Hat Dev Spaces allows software developers to work faster and deploy applications on OpenShift clusters, significantly contributing to the digitization of the German state. It replaces the need for individual laptop setups, reduces onboarding times, and provides enhanced computing power for AI development. The project standardizes development workspaces, scales for thousands of developers, adheres to data security regulations, and enables AI and ML workloads.

Read Capgemini and ITZBund’s full Red Hat success story.

Transpower New Zealand

Transpower is New Zealand's national electricity grid operator, connecting electricity generators, users, and distribution networks. Their multi-year modernization program involved updating the Market System, replacing end-of-life products, simplifying business logic, and introducing new capabilities. This program aimed to maintain a resilient, flexible, and cost-effective system. Red Hat solutions, such as Red Hat Fuse, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift, and streams for Apache Kafka, played a pivotal role in this journey. The modernized Market System reduced complexity and cost, improved reliability, and enabled support for real-time pricing. The project avoided around NZ$50 million compared to building a new system. This investment in Red Hat technologies facilitated standardization, automation, and innovation, attracting and retaining talent and enabling collaborative development and DevOps practices. It also supported their journey towards electrification and adapting to the changing energy landscape.

Read Transpower New Zealand’s full success story.

Honorable mentions

We would also like to acknowledge this year’s honorable mentions across EMEA, LATAM and APAC regions. In the EMEA region, three companies won honorable mentions for their innovative work with Red Hat technologies – Lloyds Banking Group, Saudi Aramco and Dublin Airport Authority. The LATAM region had two companies that were recognized for their achievements – Banco Santander and JUFEJUS.

Each year, Red Hat also hosts the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards to recognize the technological achievements of our customers in the APAC region who demonstrate creative thinking, determined problem solving, and innovative use of Red Hat solutions. There are many APAC innovation award winners recognized across 13 different countries for categories including, digital transformation, hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud-native development, automation and resilience.