Acuity Systems, Amadeus, Atos, BSE, Genfare, and Paddy Power Betfair Commended for Exceptional Uses of Red Hat Solutions

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the 10th annual Red Hat Innovation Awards, recognizing customers and partners for their outstanding and innovative use of Red Hat solutions. This year’s winners – Acuity Systems, Amadeus, Atos, BSE, Genfare, and Paddy Power Betfair – will be honored during Red Hat Summit, the industry’s premier open source technology event, taking place this week in San Francisco. Online voting is now open to select the overall 2016 Red Hat Innovator of the Year.

Since 2007, Red Hat has recognized the technological achievements of its customers and partners worldwide who demonstrate creative thinking, determined problem-solving, and innovative uses of Red Hat technology. Winners from the last decade represent leaders from around the world and across industries who are using open source solutions to transform their organizations and enable faster innovation.

For the 2016 awards, nominations were received with judges selecting one winning project in six categories that exemplified the most innovative achievements used to answer complex IT challenges with Red Hat solutions. From the category winners, an overall 2016 Red Hat Innovator of the Year will be selected by the community through online voting. Voting will open at 9 a.m. PT on Monday, June 27, and close at 11:59 p.m. PT on Wednesday, June 29. The winner will be announced during an awards ceremony on Thursday, June 30, at the2016 Red Hat Summit.

The winners of the 10th annual Red Hat Innovation Awards are:

Category: Accelerate, integrate, automate
Recognizing the best overall acceleration, integration, and automation of IT workloads using Red Hat solutions.

Winner: Acuity Systems
Acuity Systems is a leading solutions provider of cloud-based, big data analytics platforms and applications for the government, enabling agencies to interpret data of any type from any source. Acuity’s solutions are uniquely architected to help its customers transform data to insight to value. Its analytics platform integrates the latest open source technologies to deliver high performance, scalable and future-proof analytics applications. Acuity delivered GSA’s Data to Decisions (D2D) platform, a next generation data and decision management framework capable of government-wide scale to allow the government to better use its data resources to make more intelligent decisions while lowering costs and addressing the government’s security requirements. Acuity deployed Red Hat solutions to develop the platform, including Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization, Red Hat JBoss Fuse, and Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite. The D2D platform has evolved into an Analytics-as-a-Service platform, where the GSA can collect, manage, and analyze complex data and derive information needed to help executives, users, and even taxpayers, to make better decisions.

Category: Application development
Recognizing the most outstanding use of agile methodologies and Red Hat solutions to achieve superior overall performance while creating, maintaining, and deploying successful business applications – whether they are traditional, mobile, or cloud.

Winner: Atos
Atos, a digital services company with 100,000 employees in 72 countries, provides consulting and systems integration services, managed services and business process outsourcing, cloud operations, big data and cybersecurity solutions, and is the Worldwide IT Partner of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Atos wanted to create a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution for government departments in the United Kingdom to more easily transfer information in a secure way. The company built Canopy Digital Connect, a new SaaS solution using Red Hat JBoss Fuse, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, andRed Hat Satellite. Atos reports that the new solution can help government departments with a significant reduction in capital expenditures, thanks to the fully automated nature of the service and the absence of upfront costs for its users. The new solution is also helping government departments transform the way they engage with citizens in implementing their digital agendas.

Category: Cloud
Recognizing the most successfully illustrated cloud deployment using Red Hat cloud technologies.

Winner: Amadeus
Amadeus is a leading provider of technology solutions for the global travel industry. To meet changing customer requirements, the company needed a new computing platform that was highly available, flexible, and tolerant to infrastructure fluctuations. Amadeus chose Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, formerly known as OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat, as the foundation for its new application infrastructure, building on the company’s existing collaboration with Red Hat and its prior success with Red Hat solutions, including Red Hat JBoss Middleware. Amadeus expects its container-based cloud solution to decrease system latency to enable better customer service, increase platform availability, streamline operations through automation, and reduce time to market for new services.

Category: Infrastructure
Recognizing striking flexibility, scalability, cost effectiveness, performance, and improved security within an infrastructure.

Winner: BSE
BSE (formerly known as Bombay Stock Exchange Ltd.) is Asia’s first stock exchange. More than 5,500 companies are listed on BSE, making it the world’s largest exchange by members listed. For two decades, BSE struggled under the weight of its proprietary technologies. It found that its old infrastructure limited innovation, and the high cost of upgrades ultimately made its system economically unfeasible. The Indian stock exchange collaborated with Red Hat to build an entirely new trading system on open source technology, powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. BSE reports that since implementing its new system, it has increased its volume from 10 million orders a day to 400 million, cut hardware costs by 66 percent, and increased its trading speed from 10 milliseconds to 6 microseconds.

Category: Modernize
Recognizing the most outstanding transition from an aging, proprietary infrastructure and restrictive vendors to standardized, open source solutions.

Winner: Paddy Power Betfair
Paddy Power Betfair, the world’s largest public online betting company, conducts a massive volume of transactions rapidly, consistently, and with security top of mind on a 24×7 basis. Its legacy infrastructure was unable to keep up with its growing volume of business, so they looked into a new-generation solution that could enable a modern infrastructure, as well as improved scalability, security, and agility. Paddy Power Betfair relies on a range of Red Hat technologies and services, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Consulting, and Red Hat Technical Account Management, for their modern infrastructure. The company’s stack now delivers the power to scale out horizontally and achieve higher uptime. The ability to manage its infrastructure as code helps the company stay competitive by quickly releasing updates, new products, and conducting automated maintenance across platforms while allowing customers to continue to use its services. As an internal private cloud, it also delivers the flexibility of a public cloud while providing security features required by regulators.

Category: Transform
Recognizing the best use of Red Hat solutions to transform an IT department from a call center to a business partner that provides self-service and useful automation.

Winner: Genfare
Genfare provides smart fare and management solutions to transit agencies throughout North America, processing more than three billion transactions annually. As the fare-collection industry has evolved, Genfare needed to undergo a digital transformation – transitioning the company from a hardware company to a software company that fully embraces the Internet of Things (IoT). Genfare collaborated with Red Hat to develop Genfare Link, a cloud-based platform for fare management that supports a wide variety of fare media: mobile tickets, smart cards, magnetic cards and cash, coins and tokens. For Genfare, its new fare-management platform represents a transformation from classic embedded systems to a modern IoT infrastructure. With its open source-based platform, communication between the farebox, point-of-sale systems, ticket vending machines, and back-end systems are now facilitated through a common set of services. The new platform gives Genfare an advantage over other suppliers by enabling transit agencies to reduce their IT support, on-premise hosting, and operational costs while providing a customizable, easy to access, full-featured total fare management solution.

The 2016 Red Hat Innovation Awards judges included: Carla Arend, program director, European Software, IDC; Sean Michael Kerner, senior editor, eWEEK; Henry Peyret, principal analyst, Forrester Research, Inc.; and Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift, Red Hat.

Supporting Quotes
Marco Bill-Peter, vice president, Customer Experience and Engagement, Red Hat
“When we started the Red Hat Innovation Awards Program in 2007, we knew our customers and partners were using Red Hat solutions in many impressive ways, but nothing could have prepared us for what was to come. Over the last 10 years, we’ve learned how Red Hat technology has helped these teams improve processes, overcome challenges, and enhance their bottom line. We’ve continually been impressed by the creative solutions and innovations we’ve seen, and this year is no different. Congratulations to everyone who has been honored – this year and since 2007 – for your truly innovative accomplishments.”

Source: Red Hat, Inc.
with Business Wire