Thailand’s OSS banking story
KBTG is the tech venture of Kasikorn Bank (KBank), one of Thailand’s largest banks. It works as an in-house developer, and partners with fintech firms and tech startups to enhance its digital financial products and provide reliable service delivery amid changes in the financial sector.
When KBTG was deploying many critical business applications on proprietary application servers on the UNIX operating system, it struggled to address changing business requirements and high IT operational costs in an agile manner as the business grew. It also faced limitations in terms of adopting containers because its existing application servers were not lightweight. As such, KBTG’s infrastructure team, K Pro, always needed to manually manage its IT infrastructure to ensure that its critical applications were always up and running.
Fast forward to its system switch to Red Hat OSS, and the bank has overcome all challenges for all IT workloads and deployments. The new lightweight open-source infrastructure allows the K Pro team to use component architectures, living documentation and a common toolset. This has helped to reduce configuration sprawl, deliver IT resources at speed to support new business demands; and free up more IT budget for innovation instead of maintenance, making the K Pro team more productive.
The security and reliability of the bank’s OSS system has increased and allowed it to focus on innovating at the speed and scale required to improve customer service.
“Having a reliable and efficient IT infrastructure is crucial to helping KBank continue delivering a seamless, delightful customer experience. By using Red Hat’s open source solutions to provide a stable, automated and secure platform, the K Pro team can ensure that our critical applications—be they new or existing ones—are always running properly. This empowers us to focus more on higher-value tasks that will help the bank to be more customer-centric and to sustain competitiveness.”
— Surapan Chaimahapruek, Assistant Managing Director, Kasikorn Business-Technology Group
Enterprise-level OSS as a viable DX pathway
The acquisition of Red Hat by IBM in 2018 has propelled both firms into a strong competitive position for the post-pandemic-era’s digitalization landscape. The APAC case studies above show an alternative that may appeal to some organizations looking to ride on a flexible hybrid-cloud platform.
IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna recently noted that organizations choosing to go the OSS path with Red Hat can manage their hybrid environments regardless of location—on prem or public cloud or anything straddling the two. He has been quoted as saying: “In the hybrid world the question is where does the client want to decide where the workload runs? They could run it on Amazon. They can run on Microsoft. They can run it on IBM or they can run it on premises—open source solutions can be the glue to hold the environment together and let customers have a single way of managing this complexity.”
