Announcing the winners of the 16th annual Red Hat Innovation Awards

For the 16th year, the Red Hat Innovation Awards are recognizing 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 on society. This year’s winners are the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), the Center of Computing and Information Systems, Telefónica Colombia, the Department for Work and Pensions, and Washington Health Benefit Exchange.

A community-wide, online voting process will determine which customer is distinguished as the 2022 Red Hat Innovator of the Year. Voting is now open and will close at 9 a.m. ET on May 5. The winner will be announced on May 11, 2022, during Red Hat Summit. To vote for the 2022 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.

The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC)

CIBC provides financial services to 11 million personal, public sector, institutional, and corporate clients. The bank maintains hundreds of applications that support the financial well-being of clients that expect a personalized experience available 24x7.

CIBC needed a platform that would support its hybrid cloud strategy, with the ability to rapidly scale and adapt to changing needs. CIBC chose Red Hat OpenShift 4 because it was a leading Kubernetes de-facto standard for container orchestration, giving CIBC the flexibility to run applications in multiple environments, while ensuring operational resilience. With Red Hat technology, CIBC can develop applications in a private cloud environment, then easily promote them to a public cloud as needed, without having to refactor a lot of code, allowing developers to create and deploy applications faster and more securely. As a result, CIBC has seen a 52% improvement in deployment time and a 95% improvement in provisioning test servers. The organization also established an open source community of practice, where participants across IT teams can learn about community-developed technology and brainstorm new ways to apply open source principles to develop new services for the bank.

The Center of Computing and Information Systems

The Center of Computing and Information Systems (Mamram) is the cloud service provider to all branches of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). As part of their portfolio, Mamram maintains as-a-Service capabilities as cloudlets - small, rapidly provisioned datacenters that can be deployed at the edge and in the field to support critical operations.

A key component to Mamram’s mission is to ensure that their employees have access to critical applications, whenever and wherever they need them. Sending large amounts of data over slow connections increases the potential for failed data transfers, which endangers the lives of Israeli citizens.

Working with Red Hat Consulting and Red Hat Training, Mamram adopted Red Hat OpenShift to create a central, cloud and container-based cloudlet application that easily expands to Iot devices and edge environments, while maintaining maximum security. Using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes alongside Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform helps Mamram automate their environments and significantly accelerates edge deployments.

Mamram’s cloudlet group can provision a new cluster in less than two hours and complete a deployment in less than two minutes, reducing service delivery times to three to six hours compared to three weeks with their previous systems. These clusters allow applications to function as if they have a network connection even if the connection fails, without sacrificing their strict security and compliance requirements.

Telefónica Colombia

Telefónica Colombia is one of the country’s largest telecommunications providers, serving more than 21 million customers. To continue scaling its Mi Movistar application with a responsive, relevant experience, Telefónica Colombia migrated its IT infrastructure from existing technology to a platform that could reduce time to market and deliver more value to customers.

With the help of the Red Hat Services Journey: Container Adoption program, Telefónica moved to an open source platform using Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Fuse and Red Hat 3scale API Management. The new platform enables the organization to connect everything from legacy systems to IoT devices to elements of the Mi Movistar application, while maintaining the security parameters key to business operations. Telefónica Colombia has reduced version rollback times from 20 minutes to just two minutes, expediting maintenance times by 90%. This improvement in stability and services helps Telefónica’s customers feel more connected with their service provider, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when fully digital services became a necessity.

The Department for Work and Pensions

The United Kingdom’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) provides financial assistance and other services to around 22 million citizens. The COVID-19 pandemic created a sudden, massive increase in applications for benefits, requiring DWP to build, deliver and scale its back-end systems more quickly.

Using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, and with assistance from Red Hat Consulting and Red Hat Training, DWP can automate processes at scale with human readable, reusable playbooks. Developers can take advantage of automated, self-service provisioning to quickly access environments and resources for new projects, reducing deployment time for services from over nine hours to just 15 minutes.

DWP also uses Ansible Automation Platform to reduce paper-based, repetitive applications and provide more digital services to its citizens. In addition, Ansible Automation Platform automatically identifies citizens 80 or older for the vulnerable citizens database, removing the application process for citizens and enabling the teams who run state pensions to easily evaluate who qualifies for benefits.

Washington Health Benefit Exchange

Washington Health Benefit Exchange operates Washington Healthplanfinder, an online insurance marketplace established following the Affordable Care Act. The marketplace lets state residents find, compare, and enroll in health insurance, dental insurance and Medicaid plans. When special enrollment periods during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a rapid increase in portal traffic, Washington Health Benefit Exchange realized they needed to to improve back-end systems and integration between technologies to ensure their citizens could access healthcare options.

Working with Red Hat partner Deloitte, Washington Health Benefit Exchange adopted Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Integration to connect APIs between teams and third-party partners. The new system allowed the organization to quickly build, test, deploy, and manage new applications and features, shortening the provisioning process from more than a day to a few seconds.

Another critical piece of the project is APIs, which connect third-party partners, such as insurance providers. The average production API response times improved by  20%, which translates to 20% faster load times or transaction times for a user on the website. These infrastructure improvements helped the exchange respond to over 57,000 new users during the pandemic.