Interview with Red Hat, five-times winner at the Technology Product Awards 2019

Red Hat was something of a serial winner at the Technology Product Awards 2019, taking home five of the coveted gongs: Best Business Storage Product, Best Digital Transformation Product or Service, Infrastructure Product of the Year, Best Cloud Computing Provider and Technology Innovator of the Year. We talked about the company's success with SVP and general manager, EMEA, Werner Knoblich.

"Winning awards is always great but getting five in one night, in one country, is a big endorsement that we must be doing something right," said Knoblich. "It's a great motivational push to the teams, and the company as a whole."

The Technology Product Awards featured hundreds of strong entries from companies of all sizes - so what made Red Hat's different? For Knoblich, it's all about open source.

"What made the award entries stand out is the depth and breadth of Red Hat's product portfolio - it's interconnected, fully integrated and works together consistently.

"More importantly, our broad portfolio is developed the open source way. The Red Hat development model begins in the open source community, with thousands of contributors, and results in finished products that are tried, tested, and trusted.

"Red Hat developers actively participate in hundreds of open source projects across the IT stack. That adds up to a lot of open source experience. That expertise informs our open development model: it's innovative, iterative, and promotes security and stability.

"Whether it's migrating from proprietary virtualisation silos, transforming financial services or launching the future of defence, global organisations are turning to open source...and they're looking to Red Hat to help guide them through digital transformation."

Computing's readers vote for to choose the winners in the Technology Product Awards, and taking a prize shows that customers are enthusiastic. Knoblich says, "The Awards give you an external temperature check in the market. If we keep winning in categories where we have strong competitors, like this year, it's an endorsement from your readers that we are on the right track."

While Red Hat won five awards, the standout for Knoblich was Red Hat Open Innovation Labs winning Digital Transformation Product or Service of the Year. Although a relatively new service, it has already seen "huge success."

"Open Innovation Labs brings together a stack of open source technology, alongside process and culture to help customers learn how to build applications the Red Hat way and deliver business innovation to the organisation," he said. "We show customers how we work as a company, how we as a company act, behave and deliver value to help our own customers transform. It's not just about product or process, it's about people and how they work. That is why, to me, this really is the standout award - the award win is an endorsement of a really good offering."

As 2020 begins, Red Hat remains committed to its core principles:

"The great thing with Red Hat is that our strategy has remained unchanged for quite some time. For us, now and in the future, it's all about the open hybrid cloud, with focus around container platforms, having an environment for cloud-native application development, and automation and management.

"We believe that open unlocks the world's potential - from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, middleware, management, storage & OpenShift, every decision focuses on the value we bring to customers on their cloud journey."

The Technology Product Awards will return for 2020, and we'll be posting all the details in the coming months.