Red Hat Recognizes BC Card and KEPCO KDN for Driving AI and Cloud-Native Innovation at the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2026 for Korea

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2026 for Korea. This year, Red Hat is celebrating BC Card and KEPCO KDN (Korea Electric Power Data Network) for their forward-thinking use of open source to drive innovation, enable transformation and create meaningful impact across their organizations.

As organizations 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 turning to open source because openness brings choice, and choice brings greater flexibility -- enabling them to adopt the technologies best suited to their business needs while building the agility to respond to change.

Reflecting this year's theme, "Unlock what's next," the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2026 celebrate organizations that are leading the way with open source. This year's awards recognize 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 awards comprise five categories: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud-Native Development, Virtualization, Automation, and AI.

Category: AI

Winner: BC Card

BC Card, a subsidiary of Korea Telecom (KT) and one of Korea's leading payment platform providers, embarked on a major organizational transformation in early 2025, establishing a dedicated AI Transformation (AX) team tasked with building an enterprise-grade AI infrastructure from the ground up. As BC Card expanded its AI service portfolio to more than 10 commercialized services, rising GPU demands and the high cost of commercial large language model (LLM) APIs made it clear that the company needed a more sustainable, scalable foundation to support its ambition of becoming an AI-based financial services platform.

In collaboration with Red Hat, BC Card built an enterprise-grade, agent-based AI operations platform on Red Hat OpenShift AI, incorporating Neural Magic's vLLM compression technology, FP8 dynamic quantization and a multi-model "SLM Swarm" architecture. The transformation has reduced GPU inference costs by up to 70%, improved inference speed by two to three times, and saved an estimated 102,000 operational hours a year through AI-driven automation. BC Card has also become the first Korean financial institution to publish open source LLM models, 38 models and five datasets on Hugging Face, drawing roughly 100,000 downloads a month.

Category: and Cloud-Native Development

Winner: KEPCO KDN

KEPCO KDN, an energy ICT subsidiary of Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO), supports the digitalization of Korea's power industry across generation, transmission, transformation, distribution and sales. To modernize its supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems for transmission and substation grid control, KEPCO KDN's Power ICT Research Institute set out to replace a legacy, x86-based SCADA environment -- constrained by manual, high-risk deployment processes -- with a container-based, next-generation platform.

Working with Red Hat Counsulting, KEPCO KDN built an automated CI/CD pipeline on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Developer Hub, cutting code deployment time from days to minutes while reducing the risk of human error. The organization also carried out end-to-end architecture consulting and implemented a dedicated monitoring dashboard integrating Prometheus and Grafana, giving field teams real-time visibility into critical grid infrastructure. The project has strengthened the security and stability required for national power infrastructure and stands as a landmark reference for cloud-native adoption in Korea's traditionally conservative energy utility sector.

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."

Sungsoo Oh, Senior Vice President, Head of Division AI Data Division, BC Card

"As BC Card transforms from a payment processing company into an AI-based financial services platform, it was essential to build an infrastructure that could scale with our ambitions while keeping costs sustainable. Working with Red Hat, we replaced costly commercial APIs with an open, agent-based AI platform that has significantly reduced our GPU costs and freed our teams to focus on higher-value work. We're proud that BC Card is now contributing back to the global open source community, and we see this as just the beginning of our AI journey."

Sungchul Kim, Director, Power ICT Research Institute, KEPCO KDN

"SCADA systems are the backbone of Korea's power grid, so any transformation had to be approached with both urgency and care. By moving to a container-based platform with Red Hat, we replaced a slow, manual deployment process with an automated pipeline that lets our engineers work faster and with far greater confidence. This project shows that even the most safety-critical national infrastructure can be modernized with open source, and we see it as a model for how the energy sector can continue to innovate."