Red Hat honours IAG at its Innovation Awards for APAC

Open source specialist Red Hat has announced that IAG has won the top honour at the 2017 Red Hat Innovation Awards for Australia and New Zealand.

Red Hat says IAG has been chosen due to its outstanding and innovative usage of Red Hat solutions, and for the positive impact they have created in accelerating innovation through open source.

Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, Red Hat general manager for APAC says, "Open source has become a technology of choice to drive innovation.

"With this year's Red Hat Innovation Awards APAC, we are celebrating the success of enterprises who are driving innovation and making an impact. We are extremely honoured to have played a part in the transformation journey of these winners.

IAG is the parent company of a general insurance group with controlled operations in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.

Due to its large scale, IAG sought to consolidate its infrastructure - and the multiple silos it had grown into - to create a single data organisation and displace the costs it was incurring.

The company utilised Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, virtualization, Satellite and Ansible tools as well its OpenStack platform in its move to the cloud.

IAG says that Red Hat helped them to deliver a platform that can develop and deliver better solutions to customers more efficiently, and can better maintain customer satisfaction.

As a result of the deployment, IAG also now has a number of engineers who contribute to various open source projects, with plans to open source some of its newly developed solutions.

The Cloud Infrastructure category recognizes a collaborative public, private or open hybrid cloud deployment.

Eddie Satterly, IAG leader for data engineering and DataOps says, "Before the project, we were faced with different versions of information, making it impossible to make an informed business decision.

"Red Hat had been a trusted partner of IAG and was the natural choice for us when we set out to consolidate the system. Thanks to this project, we are now able to have greater visibility of what our customers are thinking and better serve their needs," he says.

"This award speaks to the success of not just our business, but also of open source, and we look forward to creating a more beneficial community for all."

The announcement came from the 2017 Red Hat Forum in Sydney, which brought customers, partners and IT professionals together for a number of keynote speeches and breakout sessions.

Red Hat says the Innovation Awards recognise and celebrate enterprises which use open source to address IT challenges, transform and modernise information technology, and achieve greater agility and efficiency.

As part of the 14-stop Red Hat Forum APAC event series, winners for the Red Hat Innovation Awards APAC will be announced at each stop.

This year's winners include companies from verticals such as banking, finance, government, insurance, technology, telecommunications and transportation.

All winners are evaluated by a panel of experts from Red Hat.