China Mobile Communications Corporation Internet, China National Offshore Oil Corporation and GREE Group Named Winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for China

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for China. China Mobile Communications Corporation Internet, China National Offshore Oil Corporation and GREE Group were honored at the Red Hat Forum China 2020 today for their exceptional and innovative use of Red Hat solutions.

In response to the recent global events that are causing consumer shifts, many organizations are accelerating their digital transformation efforts to adapt. In a November 2019 study sponsored by Red Hat, 95% of APAC executives surveyed said digital transformation has gained importance^[1] and perceived it as a strategy for both survival and growth in the new normal. This has increased the need to use innovative technologies to create new business models, products or services.

Since there is no one-size-fits-all blueprint for digital transformation, this year’s Red Hat Forum Asia Pacific aims to inspire organizations to unleash the power of open source technologies to achieve their short-term goals and future-proof their business for the next normal. To support that, the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 recognize the technological achievements of organizations that demonstrate creative thinking, determined problem solving and creative use of Red Hat solutions to make a difference in their business, industry or society.

The winners were selected based on the impact of their Red Hat deployments on their business goals, industry and communities, as well as the uniqueness of vision for the project. They displayed how open source platforms and culture have helped them improve productivity, agility and cost savings while empowering them to address future challenges and emerging trends more confidently and effectively. This year’s awards honored 27 APAC organizations across five categories: digital transformation, hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud-native development, automation and resilience. This year’s winners for China include:

Categories: Digital Transformation and Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Winner: China Mobile Communications Corporation Internet Ltd

China Mobile Communications Corporation Internet is a professional subsidiary of China Mobile Communications Corporation. It is responsible for the development and operation of the group’s internet products, including 139 mailboxes, mobile marketplace, multimedia messaging service (MMS) and unified authentication.

When its existing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform could not support agile deployment and struggled to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements, China Mobile Communications Corporation Internet built a platform on Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Since Red Hat OpenShift enabled different services and applications to easily share the same set of physical resources and scale easily, it helped the company reduce its total cost of ownership (TCO) and maximize the use of IT resources. The company was able to increase its CPU use and memory use by eight times and 1.2 times respectively.

The Red Hat-powered platform also empowered China Mobile Communications Corporation Internet to take a cloud-native approach by adopting containers, combining and standardizing the toolchain, and optimizing the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. The company improved the reliability of its application deployment through automated testing, and increased its application release speed by 30%, which is key to supporting its online business growth.

Category: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
Winner: China National Offshore Oil Corporation

China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) is the largest offshore oil and gas producer in China. After more than 30 years of reform and development, it has become an international energy company with businesses across more than 40 countries and regions. The five main business segments of the company include oil and gas exploration and development, engineering and technical services, refining and marketing, natural gas and power generation, and financial services.

Building on the foundation of its infrastructure-as-a-service platform, CNOOC aimed to further enhance the operational efficiency of its entire cloud platform, ensure timely response to business innovation and development, and deepen the enterprise-wide digital transformation using new technologies. CNOOC decided to build its cloud-native platform based on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Middleware to gain cloud-native development capabilities, facilitate a full life-cycle management, and modernize the infrastructure cloud, the application architecture and its agile development process.

With the latest enterprise cloud-native capabilities, including DevOps tool chain, micro-services, cloud-native development, and middleware solutions, CNOOC can deploy new applications in a non-disruptive way, significantly improving the operation efficiency of the platform and reducing the overall processing time by half. By deploying lightweight containers, CNOOC also improved its resource utilization from less than 30% to 70%. In addition, the cloud-native platform can quickly adapt to the changing needs of the users’ businesses and attract the use of business systems with its advantages of flexible expansion and flexibility. Its reliability and high-quality services have won praise from its users.

Categories: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud-Native Development 
Winner: GREE GROUP

GREE GROUP is a diversified technological global industrial group, with offerings that span household consumer goods and industrial equipment exported to more than 160 countries worldwide.

As part of its commitment to deliver its promise of providing high tech and high-quality products, Gree decided to enhance its industrial internet platform. It deployed Red Hat OpenShift on its industrial internet platform to build a hybrid cloud and DevOps platform that could unify the technical framework and processes of its various research and development (R&D) systems across the organization.

Additionally, Gree used the enterprise Kubernetes and DevOps platform to modernize its applications with containers as the platform provides a standardized container and microservice framework. The platform also enabled Gree’s application development team to quickly access resources across multiple clouds through a self-service development portal. It can also release any application change through DevOps deployment pipeline, enabling them to make changes to applications more easily and quickly as less manual intervention is needed.

The Digital Transformation category recognizes organizations that have successfully addressed IT challenges and delivered business value to effectively compete as a digital enterprise. The Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure category showcases a collaborative public, private, or open hybrid cloud deployment and the Cloud-Native Development category showcases agile methodologies and organizations that have most successfully illustrate superior overall performance in creating, maintaining and deploying successful business applications.

Supporting Quotes

Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, senior vice president and general manager, APAC, Red Hat

“2020 has been a year of uncertainties – but also possibilities. It’s inspiring to see how organizations in Asia Pacific are using open source to quickly and effectively meet changing market landscapes and consumer demands. Congratulations to this year’s winners, who we believe will become role models to other organizations looking for ideas to transform their business. We look forward to working with our customers to help them address the many real challenges our customers face today, and unlock the unlimited possibilities of taking the business forward.”

Sun Wenqing, planning manager, Systems Integration Department, China Mobile Communications Corporation Internet Ltd
“Container technology has revolutionized the way software is delivered in our organization. Initially hindered by vendor lock-in, Red Hat OpenShift has helped us adopt a cloud-native approach, which enabled us to improve our innovation capabilities and become more agile to grasp market opportunities faster.”

Dong Zhiqiang, senior manager, Cloud Computing Division, China National Offshore Oil Corporation 
“Red Hat’s open source solutions are helping us drive business growth and digital transformation. The new cloud-native platform is a key component of the solution and provides a strong foundation for transformation to help us improve resource utilization and automate operations, enabling agile development, rapid delivery, and continuous innovation. This not only represents the reform and introduction of new technology, but also provides a strong support in the transformation of the traditional information system construction model. These benefits have improved the user experience, and we now have dozens of business systems on the cloud. Its excellent performance has attracted more users onto the platform and enhanced the overall high-quality development of the Group.” 

Li Shaobin, chief information officer and assistant to the president, GREE GROUP
“Deploying Red Hat OpenShift to enhance our industrial internet platform has been a game-changer for us. It has helped us achieve rapid and agile business application delivery across hybrid cloud, and standardize the systems and specifications for application delivery. This ensures that our manufacturing processes can respond to customer needs at speed, provide better customer experience and enhance customer satisfaction – all of which will enable us to maintain an edge over our competitors.”