Red Hat Recognises Hong Leong Bank for Unlocking New Possibilities with Open Source at the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2026 for Malaysia

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2026 for Malaysia. This year, Red Hat recognises Hong Leong Bank for their leadership through open source, demonstrating how open source technologies help organisations navigate complexity, modernise operations, and deliver sustainable growth.

As organisations across Asia Pacific embrace AI, hybrid cloud, automation, and cloud-native technologies, managing complexity has become just as important as driving innovation. With AI strategies increasingly spanning different models, accelerators, and cloud environments, enterprises are looking to open source because openness brings choice, and choice brings greater flexibility. That flexibility enables them to adopt the technologies best suited to their business needs while building the agility needed to respond to change.

Reflecting this year's theme, "Unlock what's next," the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2026 celebrate organisations that are leading the way with open source. This year's awards recognise 32 winners across the region whose innovative use of Red Hat solutions is helping solve complex business challenges and deliver meaningful outcomes for customers, employees, and communities.

The winners were recognised for demonstrating how open source can help organisations turn complexity into opportunity. By modernising technology foundations, streamlining operations, and accelerating innovation, each organisation has delivered measurable outcomes that strengthen business resilience and create lasting value. Their achievements reflect Red Hat's continued collaboration with enterprises across 13 APAC countries to solve real-world challenges through open source.

The awards comprise five categories: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud-Native Development, Automation, Virtualization, and AI.

Category: Virtualization and Cloud-Native Development

Winner: Hong Leong Bank

Hong Leong Bank, one of Malaysia's leading digital-forward banks, has been recognised in the Virtualization and Cloud-Native Development category for its infrastructure enhancement efforts. As part of the bank's continuous innovation efforts, the bank sought to improve scalability of a critical online business application by addressing legacy architecture and manual processes.

To overcome these performance bottlenecks, Hong Leong Bank transitioned the application from a monolithic framework to a containerised environment using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Application Foundations. The bank also deployed Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to create a structured path for modernising its existing database infrastructure, effectively unifying virtual machines and containers onto a single, common platform.

The architectural shift has transformed the bank's operational efficiency, cutting software deployment cycles from months to weeks while eliminating manual virtual machine patching for containerised workloads. By enabling applications to scale dynamically during traffic spikes, Hong Leong Bank has built an agile foundation to accelerate the continuous delivery of innovative digital banking services.

Supporting Quotes
Daniel Aw, Vice President & General Manager, APAC, Red Hat APAC

"Enterprise technology is becoming more complex than ever, but success is no longer about how many new technologies an organisation adopts. What matters more is how effectively these solutions work together to address real business challenges and deliver tangible value. This year's winners demonstrate that the organisations best positioned for long-term success are those building open, flexible foundations that allow them to innovate on their own terms. Their achievements are a testament to what organisations can accomplish when technology decisions are guided by business needs rather than trends, and it is this approach that we are proud to celebrate through the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards."

Hong Leong Bank - William Streitberg, Chief Information & Technology Officer
"Enhancing a bank's technology environment does not happen overnight, and updating infrastructure requires us to understand what is the right-fit for our operations. Red Hat has equipped us with a common foundation for both our existing and cloud-native workloads, allowing us to introduce new capabilities faster while maintaining the reliability our customers expect."