For nearly two decades, the Red Hat Innovation Awards have celebrated the groundbreaking technological achievements of our customers worldwide. These organizations demonstrate visionary problem-solving, leveraging the power of open source to drive significant impact across industries and society. This year’s winners are Aramco, CAE, CalHEERS and the City of Vienna.
A community-wide, online voting process will determine which customer is distinguished as the 2025 Red Hat Innovator of the Year. Voting is now open and will close at 9 a.m. ET on May 15. The winner will be announced on May 21, 2025, during Red Hat Summit. To vote for the 2025 Red Hat Innovator of the Year, visit www.redhat.com/en/success-stories/innovation-awards.
Let’s take a closer look at this year’s winners.
Aramco
Aramco, one of the world’s largest integrated energy and chemicals companies, plays a role in the energy transition. In line with its vision to promote innovation and create a positive global impact, Aramco aims to increase upstream efficiency with artificial intelligence (AI)- powered solutions through its Upstream Digital Center (UDC).
Built on Red Hat technology, Aramco’s GenAI Foundation—a strategic platform that utilizes the power of generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) across upstream technologies—can assist Aramco to centralize resources, streamline operations and reduce costs. The Aramco GenAI Foundation uses Red Hat OpenShift’s built-in observability tools to monitor and manage the environment, optimizing network access, storage, and processing power. This visibility also helps Aramco analyze incoming request figures, and forecast and scale services based on demand. Aramco also uses Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to manage and configure virtual machines, reducing deployment times from weeks to hours and streamlining operations across the foundation.
The platform also allows teams to onboard gen AI models in under an hour, enhancing resource use, scalability, and availability. Developers can focus on creating innovative gen AI solutions to tackle business challenges, rather than dealing with infrastructure complexities.
Read Aramco’s full Red Hat success story.
CAE
CAE is driven by a compelling mission:to make air travel safer. The company trains approximately 135,000 pilots annually and supports an astounding 15,000 flights daily with in-flight service management — a flight every five seconds. CAE’s immersive flight simulators are highly regarded and widely used in the industry. As the recognized leader in pilot training, CAE’s cutting-edge simulators are a trusted standard for commercial airlines seeking to uphold the highest standards of safety and proficiency.
With a complex environment spanning cloud, hybrid, and on-premises systems, CAE focused on simplifying, standardizing, and automating processes. This allows its 2,000 developers and engineers to dedicate their expertise to solving real-world problems. In collaboration with Red Hat Services, CAE implemented Red Hat OpenShift, an industry-trusted hybrid cloud app platform based on Kubernetes, to manage the cloud-native development of its microservices. Red Hat OpenShift is deployed for on-premises environments, while Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS provide fully managed cloud solutions.
By embracing automation within their internal development process, CAE’s teams have accelerated their time-to-market and increased the frequency of releases. Leveraging Red Hat solutions, the flight services management company can proactively identify and resolve security vulnerabilities earlier in the development pipeline, mitigating potential delays and reducing risks. CAE has achieved significant reductions in infrastructure costs and management overhead by adopting a managed service approach to Red Hat OpenShift where feasible, standardizing processes, and fostering collaboration across IT teams.
Looking ahead, CAE is exploring a collaboration with Red Hat on a proof of concept leveraging Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to further fortify their infrastructure and accelerate their transformation.
Read CAE’s full Red Hat success story.
CalHEERS
The California Healthcare Eligibility, Enrollment, and Retention System (CalHEERS) serves all 39 million California residents, providing a vital resource for accessing, comparing, and selecting free or low-cost health insurance plans. Supported by system integrator Deloitte, CalHEERS plays a crucial resource in establishing access to quality healthcare for everyone, particularly those with lower incomes. Currently assisting approximately 17 million Californians, its usage peaks dramatically during enrollment season, handling more than 6,000 unique visitors per hour, including agents, service center and county users and consumers.
Originally built on a legacy platform in 2012, the system struggled to cope with the growing volume of traffic, impacting performance and user experience. Recognizing the need for modernization, the CalHEERS team embarked on a strategic re-architecture of the platform in the cloud, adopting a microservices approach and embracing open source tools. This provides the flexibility to quickly adapt to healthcare, regulatory, and legislative changes, accelerating updates while mitigating vendor lock-in. By integrating DevOps methodologies with the robust capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift, the CalHEERS team has gained the agility to rapidly deploy updates while maintaining round-the-clock system availability for Californians. This transformation has yielded significant advantages for CalHEERS: faster performance with 10% quicker response times, and cost-effective scalability, enabling teams to spin up a new instance in a mere 15 seconds compared to the previous 15 minutes.
During the 2025 enrollment year, a record-breaking 1.97 million consumers enrolled in health plans, and the system processed an astounding 170 million transactions. Red Hat OpenShift played a pivotal role in enabling the CalHEERS team to remain responsive to regulatory changes and shifting user needs. With an eye on continuous improvement, the team plans to integrate both artificial intelligence (AI) and human-based assistance to further streamline the user experience, providing consumers with faster, more accessible support in navigating their healthcare options.
Read CalHEERS’s full Red Hat success story.
City of Vienna
The City of Vienna’s IT department is dedicated to delivering projects that directly benefit residents, enhancing their quality of life and making the city an even better place to live. Central to its digital strategy is a forward-thinking 5-year roadmap focused on using technology ethically and responsibly to support the community. Faced with increasing service demands and an evolving workforce, the City administration is focused on streamlining processes to deliver superior services with optimal resource utilization This includes significant investments in emerging technologies like AI and the modernization of its datacenter to unlock greater efficiencies.
As a public administrative body, the City of Vienna manages and stores a vast amount of information related to written laws and decisions–data that holds significant potential for training a gen AI model. By cultivating internal expertise and retaining control over its data, the city is proactively aligning its AI initiatives with its core human-centered values. To support these ambitious efforts, Austria’s capital city needed a modern development platform that would maximize flexibility, efficiency, and accessibility of its AI solution for its employees.
The city adopted Kubernetes for container-based development, deploying Red Hat OpenShift within its datacenter to establish a standardized approach across the organization. With the flexibility to operate on-premises or in a cloud environment, the IT team relied on scalable Red Hat solutions with strong security capabilities to build upon OpenShift. This progress propels the IT team closer to realizing its vision of distributed AI-powered services. Vienna expanded its infrastructure to include Azure Red Hat OpenShift to support WienKI, a new and exciting AI initiative. This tool uses large language models (LLMs) to serve as a virtual assistant, supporting employees in their daily work by providing rapid and accurate responses to inquiries and providing relevant data.
Red Hat OpenShift has empowered the City of Vienna to accelerate its pace of innovation faster, deliver new services and functionality to the public more rapidly, and maintain frequent release cycles. Two years after its initial release, WienKI has proven successful, enabling employees to work more effectively and respond to citizen inquiries and requests with greater accuracy. The city is actively implementing Red Hat OpenShift AI to further enhance its digital services, delivering tangible benefits to both its employees and the residents of Vienna.
Read City of Vienna’s full success story.
Honorable mentions
We also extend our recognition to this year’s honorable mentions in the LATAM and APAC regions. In LATAM, Banorte, BCI, and Banestes are acknowledged for their significant achievements.
Each year, Red Hat also proudly hosts the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards, celebrating the technological achievements of our customers in the APAC region who demonstrate creative thinking, determined problem solving, and innovative application of Red Hat solutions. This year’s APAC awards recognized numerous winners across 13 different countries for their leadership in categories including digital transformation, hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud-native development, automation and resilience.
