KUALA LUMPUR (Oct 23): Malaysian firms are interested in emerging technologies, but more expertise is needed in the workforce to integrate open-source technology in their businesses, a report done by Economist Impact showed at the Red Hat Summit 2023.  

Red Hat Malaysia is a provider of enterprise open-source solutions — including Linux, the cloud, container, and Kubernetes. They provide open-source solutions for enterprises to work across platforms and environments.

Open-Source Software makes the source code of the software fully accessible, which allows a high degree of flexibility for individual adaptations in businesses. Businesses benefit from a global developer community, while enabling rapid innovation and vendor independence with open-source technology. 

Red Hat Malaysia is actively seeking inclusivity, workforce reskilling and upskilling, and fostering partnerships in helping businesses to keep contributing in a different way. Malaysian businesses are showing progress in adopting data science capabilities at 80%, and open-source technologies at 64%, in a report done by Economist Impact 2023. 

To meet industry needs and foster the development of tech talent, Red Hat signed a memorandum of understanding with Asia Pacific University (APU) — the only Malaysian university to achieve the double distinction of achieving the QS “5 Stars Plus” rating and be on the top 2.2% in the QS World University Rankings 2024.

APU wants to equip students within demand skill sets, and is currently working with Finland companies in launching a quantum computing course for their students. 

“We need to have projects coming in from the industry for students to solve, not toy with problems. And this is one of the moves that universities must take,” said Professor Dr Ho Chin Kuan, the vice-chancellor of APU of Technology and Innovation in seeking experiential learning for their students. 

Red Hat also announced the winners for the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2023. Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards has been running since 2017 in giving recognition to partners and customers for their outstanding and innovative use of Red Hat solutions. 

Petroliam Nasional Bhd (Petronas) bagged the Automation and Resilience award, while Bank Muamalat Malaysia Bhd won the Digital Transformation and Cloud-native Development award.  

Petronas deployed edge computing technology, a decentralised computing paradigm that processes data closer to the source, for the network of their 1,000 petrol stations. 

The national oil company made a shift into Red Hat's enterprise grade open-source technology for secure upgrades and patches to their stations, after the SolarWinds' supply chain attacks prompted an upgrade in cybersecurity. 

Similarly, Bank Muamalat unbundled their centralised and inflexible software architecture in their core banking systems. They were able to easily extend and integrate faster with business partners and regulations using open-source technology. 

Koh Tat Chong, the chief technology officer of Petronas, and Megat Mohammad Faisal Khir Johair, the CTO of Bank Muamalat, advised businesses to adopt the open hybrid cloud strategy, allowing data to reside both on premises and in the cloud to address data privacy and security concerns.

Koh mentioned that the deployment of low code capabilities into digital real estate within organisations is often overlooked when going digital. Petronas Dagangan Bhd is pushing for citizen developer movement where users in the business division are encouraged to build their own automation and analytics dashboard. 

“Red Hat remains Red Hat. We continue to be completely open source. So, whatever we do, we will feed it back to the community 100%,” said Tammy Tan, the country manager for Red Hat Malaysia in addressing the decision to limit access to the source code of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution.