Red Hat Recognizes JAL Digital, SoftBank, Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company and TOYOTA INDUSTRIES IT SOLUTIONS for Unlocking New Possibilities with Open Source at the Red Hat APAC[...]

Tokyo - 29 October 2026 - Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2026 for Japan. This year, Red Hat recognizes JAL Digital, SoftBank, Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company and TOYOTA INDUSTRIES IT SOLUTIONS for their leadership through open source, demonstrating how open source technologies help organizations navigate complexity, modernize operations, and deliver sustainable growth.

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 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 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 winners were recognized for demonstrating how open source can help organizations turn complexity into opportunity. By modernizing technology foundations, streamlining operations, and accelerating innovation, each organization 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, Virtualisation and AI.

Category: Cloud-Native Development, Automation

Winner: JAL Digital Co.,Ltd.

JAL Digital Co., Ltd. (JALDX), as a digital core company within the JAL Group, specializes in core system development and digital solutions for the aviation industry, supporting safe and comfortable air transport services through technology. To advance platform engineering aimed at improving developer productivity and creativity, JALDX adopted Red Hat OpenShift on AWS and Red Hat Developer Hub.

Previously, development processes were isolated, causing a high cognitive load for developers who spent up to 165 days searching for documentation and necessary data before even starting development. To overcome this bottleneck, JALDX implemented Red Hat Developer Hub as a unified self-service platform, establishing a standardized development environment "Golden Path" built on architecture governance.

As a result, development initiation lead time was drastically reduced from 165 days to just 30 minutes, simultaneously enhancing productivity and strengthening governance. Furthermore, by driving infrastructure automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, JALDX has built a scalable foundation to support company-wide AI utilization.

Category: AI

Winner: SoftBank Corp.

SoftBank Corp. (SoftBank) has been continuously advancing the development of AI-RAN, which enables AI and Radio Access Network (RAN) workloads to run on shared infrastructure, with the aim of commercializing the technology.

As part of this initiative, SoftBank is developing AITRAS, an integrated AI-RAN solution designed to enable the deployment of carrier-grade AI-RAN in commercial networks. AITRAS uses Red Hat OpenShift as its Kubernetes platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes as a platform for the integrated management of multiple workload clusters.

SoftBank is also developing the AITRAS Orchestrator. As part of this technology development, the company has developed the Dynamic Scoring Framework, a new technology that dynamically evaluates and scores the resource status of each cluster. SoftBank is also contributing to the growth of an open ecosystem by contributing this technology as open source software (OSS) to the Open Cluster Management (OCM) project. In addition, SoftBank is actively leading technical discussions on AI-RAN orchestration within the AI-RAN Alliance.

SoftBank began collaborating with Red Hat in 2024 and has since continued to pursue joint technical initiatives in advanced technology areas, including Kubernetes and AI.

Category: AI, Cloud-Native Development

Winner: Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company, Limited

Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company, Limited (SMCC), a core member of the SMBC Group, provides digital payment services across Japan. To rapidly respond to the expanding cashless payments market, SMCC shifted from an externally dependent development model to one with technological sovereignty in-house by adopting Red Hat OpenShift on AWS and Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite.

Historically, SMCC faced challenges in achieving high agility due to a lack of transparency in development productivity and code quality. To address this, with the support of Red Hat Consulting, SMCC incorporated AI-driven development, Agile, SRE, and platform engineering practices, establishing a new engineering organization.

By deploying a standardized platform powered by Red Hat solutions alongside a zero-trust software supply chain, SMCC established quantitative delivery metrics and code quality guardrails, securing safe and continuous delivery. Powered by this platform, SMCC successfully launched its mobility-as-a-service app, "PassCase," into production in June 2026. Furthermore, SMCC is preparing an AI service foundation powered by Red Hat OpenShift AI, and this platform model will continue to expand.

Category: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Winner: TOYOTA INDUSTRIES IT SOLUTIONS Inc.

TOYOTA INDUSTRIES IT SOLUTIONS Inc. (TIIS), the core IT company of the TOYOTA INDUSTRIES GROUP, provides system integration and IT infrastructure development. To optimize internal resources and shift its focus toward new development that delivers direct business value, TIIS launched a project to migrate its long-running core systems to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA).

Previously, TIIS allocated significant resources on updating aging hardware and operating systems, limiting its ability to invest in application enhancements. To address this, TIIS built a containerized environment based on Red Hat OpenShift to decouple application lifecycles from the underlying OS, while driving test automation and continuous integration.

Following a successful proof of concept, TIIS is currently containerizing three core applications and deploying them to production. By 2030, TIIS plans to migrate approximately 100 systems, which is expected to increase its IT resource investment in new services and enhancements from 10% to 50%.

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 organization 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 organizations 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 organizations 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."

Iwauchi Kazushi, Executive Officer, Digital Delivery, JAL Digital Co.,Ltd.

"We are deeply honored to receive the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2026 for Cloud-Native Development and Automation. Advancing platform engineering, JAL Digital has established a foundation that reduces development lead time from 165 days to just 30 minutes. However, this is merely a starting point for us. Our mission is to make exceptional achievements our new standard and unleash developers' creativity. Moving forward, we will continue to drive bold, limitless challenges-such as building the infrastructure to support AI utilization-and lead the aviation industry."

Ryuji Wakikawa, Senior Vice President & CTO, SoftBank Corp.

"In AI, open source brings together expertise and technologies from around the world, accelerating innovation at a remarkable pace. We want to extend that same momentum to AI-RAN. That is why we have open-sourced the AITRAS Orchestrator framework, which we developed in-house.

Realizing AI-RAN requires advanced management and optimization of resources shared across AI and RAN workloads, while ensuring carrier-grade reliability and quality of service. To meet these requirements and incorporate the latest advances in open-source technologies into commercial networks, we are collaborating with Red Hat and leveraging technologies such as Red Hat OpenShift."

Yosuke Nakagawa, Managing Executive Officer, CTO & General Manager of Digital Innovation Office, Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company, Limited

"We are transitioning from an externally dependent development model to one with in-house technological sovereignty. By building an engineering platform powered by Red Hat solutions and adopting AI-driven development, Agile, SRE, and platform engineering, we are striving to achieve high agility. Red Hat goes beyond merely providing products; working side-by-side with us, their team provides insights not only on technology but also on mindset, helping us independently navigate toward the right path. Embracing change as a constant, we aim to continuously evolve our engineering practices and contribute to the evolution of cashless payments."

Kenichi Ogata, Executive Officer, TOYOTA INDUSTRIES IT SOLUTIONS Inc.

"As the IT subsidiary of TOYOTA INDUSTRIES CORPORATION covering all business domains, TOYOTA INDUSTRIES IT SOLUTIONS adopted Red Hat OpenShift to reduce the Windows Server OS update burden on our long-running core systems and optimize IT investment. By leveraging container technology to decouple the OS and application lifecycles, we are driving a transition toward a model where systems are used for the long term and continually refined. Moving forward, through the continued expansion of adoption, we will accelerate the development of an IT environment that flexibly adapts to rapid changes and swiftly responds to emerging needs."