OSS for South Korean insurer
Orange Life, a subsidiary of Shinhan Financial Group, is a life insurance company that has been keeping pace with the development and growth of the life insurance industry in South Korea ever since its establishment in 1987.
It initially relied on Unix as its primary operating system, building upon a traditional three-tier architecture with server virtualization, which subsequently proved insufficient to support its new organizational structure centered on agile transformation. The existing infrastructure was highly dependent on administrators and operators, and made it difficult to adopt automation.
In order to be cloud-ready, cost-efficient and more agile and innovative, the firm was convinced to go with Red Hat’s OSS solutions. It used Red Hat OpenShift to transform its applications to become cloud-native so that the software can be easily migrated to the cloud in future. By moving most of its web-based applications to Red Hat OpenShift, Orange Life can also run 10 times more applications per node, lowering its IT spend on hardware and software by 50% as compared to using its previous architecture.
Additionally, the OSS system provides an efficient environment for the firm’s developers to reproduce the same applications or reuse microservices quickly. This helps developers to focus on development and quality of applications, without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. The resultant acceleration of speed-to-market and delivery of good customer experience is well received.
“Orange Life constantly strives to be a customer-centric organization that pursues service excellence and growth. With Red Hat supporting our agile transformation, we’re able to deliver more reliable, high-quality, innovative services to our customers at speed, while becoming more cost-effective. The new platform will also be the foundation for our business growth as it can easily cope with increasing workloads or scale on-demand in future.”
— Sangwook Han, Vice President And Head Of IT Group, Orange Life
Malaysian social security organization goes open source
As one of the government departments under Malaysia’s Ministry of Human Resources, SOCSO (otherwise known as PERKESO) covers all social security provisions and administration for workers in the country. PERKESO’s Social Security Protection is based on the concept of joint responsibility through the pooling of resources; sharing of risk and replacement of income; and provision of social security protection to employees and their dependents through various schemes.
Due to the Pelan Transformasi PERKESO 2017 strategic plan, the social security organization (SSO) needed to transform its services through rebranding. This called for the organization to modernize its legacy remuneration systems, which consists of modules that are hard-wired with codes and integrated with isolated web services and batch processing scripts.
Upon choosing the open source approach, PERKESO deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run its servers, and developed new applications that are modular and integrated with Red Hat Fuse. It also built business processes and workflows with other Red Hat solutions.
In this digitalization move, PERKESO reduced operational costs, extended the availability of its services, and ensured that its services reach more stakeholders. About 400,000 employers can now perform transactions such as contribution submissions and payments via the SSO’s new digital channels instead of having to visit a physical branch.
Meanwhile, employees can access their profiles and contribution-related information in PERKESO’s online systems, thereby becoming more-informed contributors. Additionally, the online channels have helped the organization to deliver a better user experience and reduce the number of user complaints. The SSO can also ensure self-employees such as taxi drivers and drivers working for e-hailing services are protected under PERKESO.
“PERKESO’s vision is to be the premier, dynamic and outstanding leader in social security. Red Hat’s solutions have been integral to our transformation strategy, allowing us to scale and improve business agility. With reduced operational costs and improved services, we can introduce and deliver new digital services rapidly, and improve our customer service and reach effectively.”
— Dr Mohammed Azman Aziz Mohammed, Chief Executive Officer, SOSCO Social Security Organization
