How APAC firms are using open source software
Open source software has evolved from providing low-cost alternatives to proprietary offerings to a platform for innovation.
Most recent developments in cloud computing and software development, such as Kubernetes in the case of containers, for example, are first happening in open source.
Indeed, users of open source software at Red Hat Summit 2019 are embracing the technology not only to save costs, but also to tap new capabilities to solve business problems.
In the case of South Korea’s Lotte Card, the use of OpenShift has enabled the credit card company to keep up with the growing number of transactions over the years, said Jeong-hwan Kim, vice-president and CIO of Lotte Card.
Lotte Card boasts nine million customers and processes an average of three million transactions a day.
Kim said by moving its core systems to OpenShift, Lotte Card has not only improved transaction performance by 10 times and reduced costs by 10%, it is also able to deliver personalised marketing messages for customers using big data.
To DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, open source software is a key to its digital transformation efforts.
Its group CIO David Gledhill noted that as DBS transforms itself to become a technology company, it has to harness the same open source technologies that are being used by hyper-scale companies such as Facebook, Google and Netflix, just to name a few.
DBS’s datacentres, for example, are designed based on Facebook’s open source datacentre blueprint. The bank also uses Netflix’s Chaos Monkey resiliency tool to expose its engineers to failures more frequently, so as to incentivise them to build more resilient services.
Gledhill, however, stressed that these tools are only used for testing and development rather than on production systems.
That’s where Red Hat’s OpenShift, which offers enterprise-grade support, comes in. Gledhill said the use of OpenShift for production systems has resulted in cost savings of as much as 80%, as well as improved DBS’s time-to-market by 10 times.
The situation is similar at Spark NZ, a telco in New Zealand that has moved its integration services from IBM Websphere to Red Hat OpenShift in an effort to improve operations and customer service.
Spark NZ’s general manager for IT applications Niall Fitzgerald said the lift-and-shift effort has enabled the company to deploy application changes quickly without outages, as well as put in place automation and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities.
Red Hat commissioned TechTarget APAC to cover Red Hat Summit 2019 in Boston. The above content was not reviewed or influenced prior to publication.