Red Hat has been awarded the Ford IT Innovation award. In its fourth year, the award recognizes Ford’s technology partners that have helped company launch new capabilities and services or enhance existing operations.

According to the company, the Ford IT Innovation Award emphasizes Red Hat’s work related to the digital transformation of stateful applications across Ford’s hybrid cloud environment, spanning dispersed datacenters and multiple public clouds. It also showcases Red Hat’s leadership in enterprise Kubernetes innovation and its collaboration with Ford Motor Company’s technical leaders.

Over the past year, Ford has been working with Red Hat to move stateful applications to more elastic, cloud-based deployment patterns. Using Red Hat OpenShift 4 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS with Kubernetes Operators automation has enabled Ford to attach its solution to high-performing bare metal deployments and geographically distant datacenters or public clouds.

With this mixture of on-premise, virtual and cloud-based deployments, Ford is said to have been able to deliver an infrastructure-agnostic approach for application services that can be the hardest to transform.