Red Hat announced its APAC Innovation Awards 2026 winners for Korea on Tuesday, October 27, the same day it held Red Hat Summit: Connect 2026 in Seoul. The Korea winners are payment company BC Card and energy IT provider KEPCO KDN. Across Asia Pacific, this year’s awards recognize 32 organizations in five categories: Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud-Native Development, Virtualization, Automation and AI.
BC Card: AI on OpenShift AI
BC Card, a subsidiary of Korea Telecom, set up a dedicated AI transformation team in early 2025 and now runs more than 10 commercial AI services. Facing rising GPU demand and the cost of commercial LLM APIs, it built an agent-based AI operations platform on Red Hat OpenShift AI, using vLLM compression, FP8 dynamic quantization and a multi-model “SLM Swarm” design. Red Hat says the platform cut GPU inference costs by up to 70%, made inference two to three times faster and saves an estimated 102,000 operational hours a year. BC Card has also published 38 open models and five datasets on Hugging Face.
KEPCO KDN: modernizing grid SCADA
KEPCO KDN, the energy ICT arm of Korea Electric Power Corporation, replaced a legacy x86 SCADA environment for transmission and substation control with a container-based platform built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenShift and Red Hat Developer Hub. According to Red Hat, deployments that used to take days now take minutes. KEPCO KDN and Red Hat Korea also presented the OpenShift-based “K-SCADA” transition at the Seoul event, which drew about 500 attendees, according to ZDNet Korea.
Context
The awards are part of a busy month for Red Hat in Asia Pacific, following the opening of its APAC AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore.
Sources: Red Hat press release, Digital Today and ZDNet Korea.