FAST FACTS

Industry: Government

Geography: Italy

Challenge: One of the top fifteen software and services companies in Italy, CSI-Piemonte has been promoting the modernization of the local public administration for thirty years. Its specific objective was to develop an open source platform for the supply of business applications which offered a real competitive advantage for companies in Piedmont.

Solution:

• Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Application Server 4.0.5 with jdk 1.5 and mod_jk, configured in clusters. DB Server MySQL 5.0 and Web server Apache 2.0.
• Hardware: two Intel-based servers, dual core processors, 8 GB RAM

Benefits:

• CSI-Piemonte has experienced improved performance from superior service levels and high reliability since migrating to Red Hat solutions. Its new solution offers an efficient infrastructure with extremely competitive cost.
• The solution’s standardised and open platform is robust, reliable, and offers excellent performance with reduced development time.

This story is available in the following languages: [  |  ]

BACKGROUND
CSI-Piemonte is a consortium which has been developing IT systems for public sector organisations in Piedmont, Italy for 30 years. It’s now one of the top fifteen software companies in Italy and is a national and European benchmark in the Information & Communications Technologies (ICT) sector. The consortium creates products with a high technological content, designs IT applications and systems, and contributes to the creation of innovative services for citizens and businesses. It provides its clients with versatile work tools and processes highly advanced technological solutions for all public areas. CSI-Piemonte has annual profits of 178 million Euros, maintains more than 1,200 employees, operates in 8 regional centres, and holds over 50 consortium members.

CHALLENGE
CSI-Piemonte’s main activities include supporting the research sector and encouraging innovation within ICT and other businesses in Piedmont. The company is a benchmark in the region for promoting the adoption of technologies that guarantee real competitive advantages. CSI’s objective was to develop an open source platform to support business applications that offered a real competitive advantage for companies in Piedmont.

CSI wanted to create an industrial-level platform which was completely open source for the supply of application services.

SOLUTION
CSI-Piemonte has over 10 years of experience with open source solutions. It introduced PERL for web developments first, but truly became focused on open source in 2006 when it began research on the development of open source business services for local public administration.

After much research, CSI chose JBoss Enterprise Platform for its well-established reputation, for its professional support, and because of the rate of innovation that has always been typical of its community. The project began in 2006 and was carried out in-house with Red Hat and JBoss support. Called OASI (Open Available Secure Integrated), this infrastructure makes use of the best open source components on the market, is configured to be highly available in order to guarantee high service levels, and is integrated, tested, maintained, and documented.

“We developed OASI to offer ourselves and companies in our region a real competitive advantage and to have a concrete meeting point for the community,” says Luca Gioppo, Manager of the Open Source Area at CSI-Piemonte. “We had open solutions for some time already, but this time we saw the opportunity to make its use systematic within a more complete and structured platform.”

Available on the website http://oasi.csi.it, the solution will be issued with a General Public Licence (GPL). The site is also a community meeting point and users have access to collaborative development tools and documentation with a creative commons licence.

“Our objective is to create an OASI community with two important meeting opportunities: on one hand the companies involved in platform support and development and on the other hand, businesses who use the infrastructure for training purposes or to provide other businesses with services,” said Gioppo.

The OASI platform is a perimeter which outlines the limits and provides the references for operating. To be more specific, those involved in development will have the objective of making improvements and offering increasing levels of integration and completeness in order to comply with the various requirements of public administration. The results of these efforts will be made available to the community from a perspective that matches the philosophy which has always distinguished Red Hat and JBoss.

In accordance with the need for reliability and high availability, CSI-Piemonte has developed an administration console for the handling of the JBoss application servers which have been clustered on the same domain or on various different host domains.

BENEFITS
Created with the best open source components on the market, the OASI platform guarantees superior service levels and high reliability. CSI-Piemonte can now make use of an efficient infrastructure with extremely competitive cost savings. The platform comes in the form of a General Public Licence (GPL) and with the guarantee that it’s a standardised and shared platform. Now, client companies can concentrate on their core business.

With an open source solution, CSI-Piemonte will benefit from the continuous contributions of involved community members. The improvement of this infrastructure will therefore be constant and continuous, allowing companies in Piedmont to make use of a platform which is increasingly efficient, integrated, and modern.

The acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat has been received very positively by CSI. “We are very happy that the two companies are now one,” said Gioppo. “Red Hat’s decision to acquire JBoss is a further confirmation of the correctness of our choice and consolidates our long-standing relationship with Red Hat, a success which is also confirmed by the more than 80 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers we currently operate.”

CSI-Piemonte’s experience with Red Hat solutions has been very fulfilling. “I can happily say that JBoss fully meets our expectations in terms of reliability, robustness, and performance,” said Gioppo. “And the economic benefit is extremely plain to see, especially if we consider the support costs.”