Red Hat
(L-R) The Red Hat Forum 2019 featured executives Damien Wong, Vice President and General Manager, Asian Growth & Emerging Markets (GEMs), William John Streitberg, Chief Information and Technology Officer, Hong Leong Bank, Choong Lee Chen, Head of Lifestyle Banking, Alliance Bank, Lee Choo Yee, Head of Digital Innovation and Design, Alliance Bank, and Eric Quah, Country Manager for Red Hat Malaysia.

Red Hat Encourages Malaysian SMEs on Open Source at 2019 APAC Forum

Technology

Red Hat today held the Kuala Lumpur edition of its premier open source technology event series, Red Hat Forum APAC 2019. With the theme “Expanding Your Possibilities,” the session aims to inspire Malaysian organizations to address the challenges they face and expand their possibilities with open source to generate impactful innovations.

The Forum serves as a platform for customers and partners to learn about trends and developments in open source, exchange ideas on ways to address critical pain points with open source, share success stories, and network directly with Red Hat and its ecosystem of technology partners.


The series showcased how customers are using open source innovations to modernize their infrastructure and applications to deliver exciting innovations. Red Hat announced the winners of the 2019 Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards for Malaysia. Alliance Bank Malaysia Berhad and Hong Leong Bank Berhad (“HLB”) were recognized at the event for their outstanding and innovative usage of Red Hat solutions. Alliance Bank Malaysia Berhad were awarded for the ‘Digital Transformation, Agile Integration’ category whereas HLB was recognized for the ‘Digital Transformation, IT Optimization’ category.

At the media session, Red Hat executives also shared about their collaboration with the Human Resource Development Fund (HRDF) to address the technology skillset gap among SMEs in Malaysia, particularly in open source. Through the IND-CERT (industry certification program) with InfoTrek, Red Hat’s authorized training partner, the company is helping professionals to learn about its emerging technologies such as Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack.

The event was hosted by Damien Wong, Vice President and General Manager for Red Hat GEMs (Asian Growth Emerging Markets) and Eric Quah, Country Manager, Red Hat Malaysia. Referring to a recent ‘State of Enterprise Open Source’ report, the executives shared that enterprise software is here to stay, with 89% of IT leaders stating that open source is important to their organization strategy.

Red Hat has been helping enterprises from across numerous industries in Malaysia and around the region – including the government, financial services and telecommunications, to gain greater flexibility and agility by using open source to help transform and innovate.