Red Hat extends ideals to its Open Innovation Labs

• Designed to provide a collaborative, residency-style immersive environment
• Helps team explore problem-solving using agile, lean and design thinking

RED Hat is a software company with an open source heart and soul, so it comes as no surprise that its Open Innovation Labs – launched 2017 in Singapore – adopts a similar approach.

In a recent media briefing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs head of delivery Sandra Arps says that the lab is designed to provide a “collaborative, residency-style immersive environment that promotes rapid innovation and development” across the APAC region.

The lab environment reflects Red Hat’s core tenets: collaboration, sharing, adaptability, and renewal.

Through the lab, IT teams get to work closely with Red Hat consultants, engineers and subject matter experts to modernise existing applications or create new ones with open source and DevOps.

Those interested in engaging with the Open Innovation Labs will first be brought through a short on-site discovery session, which helps set goals and expectations. After that, using Red Hat’s push button infrastructure and automated development environments, teams are able to quickly start development.

Red Hat Southeast Asia general manager Benjamin Henshall says that Malaysian customers accelerating their digital transformation journey are showing interest towards adopting “holistic and improved ways to foster innovation.”

Highlighting local customer feedback, he explained that it’s important for customers to realise that “where we create can be just as important as what we create.”

The idea, ultimately, is to help companies – regardless if they’re solving legacy problems, or tackling new challenges – to define their innovation path towards delivering business value, all through a collaborative engagement.

Red Hat shares that during the residency, the team gain first-hand experience on how to apply agile development methodologies and make use of open source technologies to rapidly build prototypes, do DevOps, and adopt agile development.

Citing examples across APAC of Heritage Bank from Australia, NSE from India and some of the local projects that are under way, Arps points out that Red Hat is helping teams explore different ways of approaching a problem using agile, lean and design thinking in a span of six to eight weeks

Adding to that, Red Hat Malaysia country manager Eric Quah says that customer teams work directly with Red hat consultants and engineers throughout their residency.

“Amidst all of this, nothing is more important than culture. The Open Innovation Labs help organisations work and have empathy towards one another and create an open culture where people can help each other and collaborate together,” he says.