Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winner of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2022 for Thailand. CIMB Thai Bank and KASIKORN Business-Technology Group (KBTG) were honored at the Red Hat Summit: Connect today for leveraging Red Hat solutions to enhance their customers’ experiences and accelerate their infrastructure team’s productivity in an evolving business landscape.

In line with this year’s theme of “Explore what’s next”, the Red Hat Summit: Connect celebrates organizations’ ability to adapt to rapidly changing business environments, transform their business models and deliver better experiences to customers with open source. This year, the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards recognizes the digital transformation success of 26 organizations in the region for their creative use of Red Hat solutions to stay ahead of industry trends and customer needs.

In today’s fast changing business environment, agility and innovation are crucial for business success. According to Red Hat’s State of Enterprise Open Source 2022 report, 95 percent of Asia Pacific enterprises say that open source is important to their organization’s overall enterprise infrastructure software strategy, helping them stay nimble and respond to changing customer demands in the long run.

The winners showcased the positive impact of their Red Hat deployments to support their business vision, workplace culture, industry and communities. They demonstrate how open source tools and culture have the power to accelerate business processes, enhance productivity, stimulate innovation and address future challenges.

The awards comprise five categories: Digital Transformation, Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud-native Development, Automation and Resilience.

Category: Digital Transformation and Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Winner: CIMB Thai Bank

CIMB Thai Bank Public Company Limited (CIMB Thai Bank), envisions becoming a leading digital bank within ASEAN and aims to shape itself as a high-performing sustainable organization to advance customers and society through leveraging best-in-class financial solutions, ASEAN networks and technology. Today, CIMB Thai Bank is the 8th largest commercial bank in Thailand and is listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand.

To fulfill their vision of becoming a leading digital bank and better meet the demands of their digitally savvy customers, CIMB Thai Bank prioritized the development of digital banking solutions, such as e-payments and cross bank transfer services. In their initial efforts to build these solutions, CIMB Thai Bank wanted to accelerate their development cycles as their digital infrastructure needed to support a higher volume of workloads. In order to ensure the building and scaling of innovative applications, and to deliver these apps at accelerated speeds, CIMB Thai Bank identified the need for a new digital banking platform.  CIMB Thai Bank leveraged open source solutions Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA) to provide the new banking platform’s agility, scalability and resiliency to support high development volumes on both cloud and on-premise environments.

The solutions have managed to speed up the delivery of new digital banking solutions which has also contributed to improvements in their customer experience scores. The Bank’s infrastructure team has also experienced cost savings, and now has greater flexibility to build more digital business functions and leverage new technologies thanks to the benefits offered by open source solutions.

Category: Digital Transformation and Cloud-Native Development
Winner: KASIKORN Business-Technology Group (KBTG)

KASIKORNBANK (KBank) is a banking group founded in 1945 that provides services to a comprehensive set of consumers, including commercial and corporate banking products such as foreign exchange, lending, credit card, and personal-home-car loan and hire purchases. KBank is currently Thailand’s number one mobile banking provider with more than 18.6 million users on K PLUS. As of 2022, KBank is ranked the fourth highest bank in Thailand in terms of assets and deposits, and ranked third in terms of loans market share. KBTG is the dedicated IT arm of the bank that maintains its digital infrastructure and develops technology for the future of KBank.

To maintain their leadership as Thailand’s top digital banking provider and to support continuous business growth, KBTG looked to further modernize their digital infrastructure and continue delivering a broader range of digital services and offerings. KBTG sought greater flexibility and agility than its previous platform, in order to deploy more services and applications that would keep pace with the rapid growth of digital transactions. This required KBTG to enhance their platform to speed up the time-to-market for digital channel services and products. In January 2022, KBTG expanded their use of open source solutions Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, which helped orchestrate, build and deploy new applications on-premise quickly by modernizing key infrastructure technologies such as programming languages and containers. Leveraging Red Hat’s solutions enabled KBTG’s infrastructure team to reduce time to provision systems and deploy applications from 3 days to within a day, improving the team’s speed in delivering new applications and features.

Supporting Quotes

Marjet Andriesse, senior vice president and general manager, APJC, Red Hat
“As digital transformation via the Thailand 4.0 plan continues to accelerate, we celebrate the achievements of our customers who have demonstrated how open source can help them stay agile and responsive to market and customer trends. Our Thailand winners have showcased exceptional agility and innovation when it comes to using technologies like hybrid cloud to increase application development speed and time-to-market for their business and customers. I hope that they will serve as an inspiration for more organizations in Asia Pacific to unlock the potential of open source.”

Paisan Thumpothong, Head of Technology and Data , CIMB Thai Bank

“As part of our efforts to remain competitive in Thailand’s financial landscape, CIMB Thai Bank has prioritized the need for more personalized digital banking solutions for our customers. To ensure that our digital infrastructure could keep up with the increased pace of product development efforts, we built a new digital banking platform to harness the flexibility and scalability of hybrid cloud technologies. Red Hat’s open source solutions were instrumental in supporting this shift by providing the ability, scalability and resiliency capabilities for this platform on both our on premise and cloud environments.”

Tawan Jithavech, Chief Technology Officer, KBTG

“KBank has been the number one digital bank in Thailand, and we are constantly innovating to make sure we maintain that position. Modernizing our application infrastructure was thus a necessity for us to ensure that we could continue enhancing our customers’ digital experiences by delivering new digital services and offerings. Red Hat’s solutions ensured that our infrastructure’s key components, such as our programming languages and containers, were optimized to deliver new applications and features to market quickly.”