Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2026 for India. This year, Red Hat recognises Adani Airport Holdings Limited, Bharti Airtel Ltd, Department of Information Technology & Communication (DoIT&C), Government of Rajasthan, and Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), Ministry Of Railways for their leadership through open source, demonstrating how open source technologies help organisations navigate complexity, modernise operations, and deliver sustainable growth.

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As organisations 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 organisations that are leading the way with open source. This year’s awards recognise 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 recognised for demonstrating how open source can help organisations turn complexity into opportunity. By modernising technology foundations, streamlining operations, and accelerating innovation, each organisation 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 six categories: Digital Transformation, Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud-Native Development, Automation, Virtualisation, and AI.

Category: Cloud-Native Development
Winner: Department of Information Technology & Communication, Government of Rajasthan
The Department of Information Technology & Communication (DoIT&C), Government of Rajasthan, leads the use of technology across Rajasthan government departments and autonomous bodies to improve administration and public service delivery. Its responsibilities include IT consultancy, e-governance implementation, technical guidance, capacity building, and the delivery of IT infrastructure and software solutions across the Rajasthan government.

To modernise its digital governance ecosystem, DoIT&C needed to address legacy systems, siloed applications, manual provisioning, limited scalability and slow deployment cycles across platforms such as e-Mitra and Raj Kaaj. The organisation adopted Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, Red Hat Application Foundation, Red Hat Trusted Application Pipeline and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, supported by Red Hat Consulting and Red Hat Training and Certification, to move from virtualised environments to a standardised, container-based platform with greater automation and DevOps capabilities. The transformation reduced service rollout time by 30-40%, improved system availability and performance by 25-35%, automated 50-60% of infrastructure and operations, and accelerated application development and deployment cycles by around two times. This has helped DoIT&C shift from a reactive, maintenance-heavy IT model to a more agile, innovation-focused ecosystem, improving governance efficiency and delivering faster, more reliable services to citizens.

Category: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud-Native Development
Winner: Adani Airport Holdings Limited
Adani Airport Holdings Limited (AAHL), India’s largest airport infrastructure company, manages, operates and develops eight airports across the country. Its network accounts for 24 per cent of passenger footfalls and 33 per cent of air cargo traffic in India, serving passengers, airlines, logistics companies, retailers and other airport stakeholders. 

As Adani Airports expanded its digital capabilities, it needed a more scalable and flexible integration platform to connect more than 20 diverse airport systems, accelerate the onboarding of new applications and support operations across on-premise and cloud environments. Using Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Application Foundation and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Adani Airports built a hybrid cloud integration platform to deliver real-time data across its airport ecosystem. The platform has improved system performance, reducing response times from a few seconds to microseconds, while providing travellers with more transparent and accurate information on wait times, baggage and flight status. Faster detection of bottlenecks and operational issues is helping airports improve efficiency, reduce congestion at checkpoints and enhance the passenger experience, while supporting faster turnaround times and on-time performance for airlines.

Category: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud-Native Development
Winner: Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), Ministry Of Railways
Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), a public sector enterprise under the Ministry of Railways, is the digital, catering, tourism and hospitality arm of Indian Railways. It operates India’s largest online railway ticketing platform, alongside catering, tourism, hospitality and premium train services, supporting millions of passengers across the country every day.

With nearly 89% of reserved railway tickets booked online, IRCTC’s next-generation e-ticketing platform (NGeT) had become business-critical but capacity-constrained, especially during Tatkal and peak booking periods. With Indian Railways serving approximately 2-2.5 crore passengers daily and more than 8 billion annually, scalability, uptime and transaction performance are critical to IRCTC’s digital services. To strengthen these capabilities, IRCTC adopted a containerised, microservices-based platform built on Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, supported by Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for end-to-end orchestration. The modernisation enabled the platform to auto-scale during periods of intense demand, helping to address the system failures and booking disruptions during peak periods. It has also improved infrastructure efficiency and accelerated application boot times, enabling teams to release new versions faster and with less friction. By replacing manual, error-prone operational tasks with automated workflows, IRCTC is also strengthening its security posture, reducing operational effort and freeing developer resources for higher-value work.

Category: Virtualization
Winner: Bharti Airtel Ltd
Headquartered in India, Bharti Airtel is a global communications solutions provider with over 650 million customers in 15 countries across India and Africa. The company also has its presence in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka through its associate entities. The company is ranked second amongst mobile operators globally, and its networks cover over two billion people.

To deliver on its customer-first promise at massive scale, Airtel has been reengineering its infrastructure and moving from legacy, manual systems to open, flexible, cloud-native platforms. This future-ready foundation has helped Airtel innovate new technology solutions delivering enhanced customer experiences across its digital services, including recharge, billing and self-service applications. As part of this transformation, Airtel has been leveraging Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, Red Hat Quay and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

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 organisation 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 organisations 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 organisations 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.”

Additional Resources

• Learn more about the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2026

• Learn more about Red Hat Summit: Connect

About Red Hat
Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow’s IT challenges. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.

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