Intel and HP Customer Success Story:

Customer: Arabian Automobiles

Business Challenge: Arabian Automobiles needed to transform its business technology infrastructure to support double-digit growth. This required increased performance, reliability, and scalability while adhering to open-standards based architectural principles

Solution: Following internal architectural principles and based on the recommendations of HP Services and Intel, Arabian Automobiles implemented Intel® Itanium processor–based HP Integrity servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux at the database tier and HP ProLiant server blades based on Intel® Xeon® processors at the application tier

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle E-Business Suite: 38 modules with 20 additional major vertical extensions that support all business units, Oracle 9i RAC

Hardware: HP Integrity rx7640 Servers with Intel Itanium 2 processors, HP BL480c Server Blades with Intel Xeon processors, HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrary

Benefits: Improved customer satisfaction by 15 percent, increased process automation to 80 percent from 40 percent, improved availability to 99.2 percent from, simplified management of IT with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on standards-based Integrity servers with Intel Itanium 2 processors. This provided a reliable, high-performance, and highly scalable infrastructure for Oracle® E-Business Suite and the integrated application modules running all of the company’s business units

Download the Case Study PDF at Intel.com

Background: One of the largest automobile distributors in the Middle East and the sole distributor for Nissan, Infiniti, and Renault in Dubai and the Northern Emirates. The flagship company of the AW Rostamani Group, Arabian Automobiles believes its greatest asset is ensuring that every customer can leave any of its company showrooms with confidence that they are receiving the world’s finest driving technology backed by a level of service and support second to none.

FAST FACTS

Company: ITI Neovision

Industry: Broadcast media

Geography: EMEA, Poland

Business Partner: Atom-Tech, Red Hat Advanced Business Partner in Poland recommended Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the solution

Business Challenge: ITI Neovision looked to replace its enterprise platform solution, with a virtualized environment that could be supported by local teams.

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization and Red Hat Cluster Suite

Hardware: HP BladeSystem BL460c

Migration Path: Gentoo Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: ITI Neovision has deployed a stable, reliable and officially supported platform which ensures availability of the company’s broadcast services. Red Hat Enterprise Linux with virtualization has significantly improved hardware management in terms of full utilization of available servers. Red Hat virtualization can easily scale to accommodate the demand for new servers. The company has also achieved significant cost savings and obtained all the required components in one solution.

“With Red Hat we obtained everything we needed – operating system, virtualization, firewall etc. – in one package whereas with proprietary vendors we would have to buy everything separately. We have achieved significant cost savings by selecting the Red Hat solution.”
- Maciej Hajduk, IT Infrastructure Manager, ITI Neovision.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The ITI Group is Poland’s leading media and entertainment group. It is active in television broadcasting and production, multiplex cinema operations, home video and theatrical distribution, special events organisation and new media. As a subsidiary of the ITI Group, ITI Neovision offers the first Polish DTH (Direct to Home) platform, called “n”. The platform includes High Definition television channels and digital entertainment services broadcasting. The “n” package broadcasts 79 television channels, hundreds of satellite channels as well as a vast library of movies and TV series’ in the Video on Demand package. As the new generation TV, “n” continuously expands its programmes and introduces new services and channels, many of them in High Definition.

The dynamic growth and excellent results of “n” reflects a unique combination of high quality content offerings and innovative services. In June 2008, ITI Neovision launched a triple-play service combining television, internet and telephony. Following the upgrades of the nBox HDTV and nBox HDTV recorder software, subscribers of “n” have gained access to a range of new services and functionalities such as remote recording through internet and mobile phones. In October 2008, “n” launched its pre-paid television service “telewizja na karte”.

ITI Neovision worked with Atom-Tech, a Poland based Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, that focuses on generating measurable benefits for their customers by using the latest technologies and highly qualified personnel”. Atom-tech provides customers with, consulting services, IT services, and assistance with the production of customised software applications.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
ITI Neovision required a new enterprise platform which would allow it to quickly and easily implement new technology solutions and also benefit from fully accredited local support. ITI Neovision’s hardware supplier, did not support its previous platform, Gentoo Linux.

ITI Neovision considered two possible solutions – Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise. A positive experience with the Red Hat community version, a well-known brand name and HP’s ability to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux were the main criteria for selecting the Red Hat solution. Local partner Atom-Tech, who recommended the Red Hat solution, proved to be a reliable local partner during deployment.

SOLUTION
ITI Neovision deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 with virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform as its standard platform, all of which is running on HP BladeSystem. Other components of the infrastructure are MySQL database, Apache web server, FTP server, proxy server and SAN Network.

There are five host machines running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Every host machine supports four virtual machines including all the necessary applications. The virtual machines are also services in a failover cluster including Microsoft Windows 2003 servers. Such a set up offers ITI Neovision a high level of flexibility as it enables the migration of virtual machines between physical servers as needed. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Red Hat Cluster Suite ensures high availability of the virtual instances, which run ITI Neovision’s mission-critical applications.

BENEFITS
It is of the utmost importance to ITI Neovision to have a robust, stable and reliable platform which ensures availability of the company’s broadcast services. Since deployment the number of outages has been reduced significantly.

Another important benefit is ease of use. The Red Hat solution includes l a number of useful tools, such as clustering which enables the automation of several tasks managed by the IT department, increases work efficiency and saves time on a daily basis. Atom-Tech, the Red Hat Advanced Business Partner in Poland, provides local Polish language support which is crucial for ITI Neovision, as well as excellent IT engineering skills.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has significantly improved hardware management by making the best possible use of all available hardware. Previously, servers were under-used in terms of processing memory because each operating system required one physical machine. Now thanks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization, ITI Neovision can use one physical machine for five operating systems. ITI Neovision is a fast growing company and with the Red Hat solution it is able to scale to meet any future growth.

“New projects are coming along almost every day and Red Hat virtualization can easily accommodate the demand for new servers. We can literally deploy a new server in a minute,” says Maciej Hajduk, IT Infrastructure Manager, ITI Neovision.

The Red Hat solution is less costly compared to proprietary alternatives, particularly because there are no license fees involved. An important added value of the Red Hat solution is that it contains all the necessary components in one solution set.

“With Red Hat we obtained everything we needed – operating system, virtualization, firewall etc. – in one package whereas with proprietary vendors we would have to buy everything separately. We have achieved significant cost savings by selecting Red Hat solution which is very important in the current economic climate,” said Maciej Hajduk, IT Infrastructure Manager, ITI Neovision.

FUTURE
ITI Neovision is planning to expand its Red Hat deployment to include the full 24/7 Red Hat support as well as leveraging Red Hat training and certification. As a result of its excellent experience with the current platform Red Hat has become part of the long term IT strategy at ITI Neovision. The company is planning to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux on more servers and thereby increase the potential for virtualization. Additional virtual instances are currently being installed on the same hardware server as a testbed for other platforms. Further expansion on other Red Hat products is also being considered.

Dubai, U.A.E. – – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Emirates Group IT, operating under the brand name Mercator, a global provider of business technology solutions, delivering business transformation, process improvement and return on investment to more than 100 customers in over five continents, has standardized its IT operations on a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware after a three month pilot program..

In an effort to simplify its datacenter and reduce the total cost of operations for web server technologies, the Emirates Group migrated approximately 80% of its comparable servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat’s middleware solution portfolio offers a certified and supported platform for other open source technologies, a critical factor for the Emirates Group when deciding to standardise on open source technologies.

“Migrating to a new standard can be highly complex in an organisation the size of the Emirates Group/Mercator,” said Patrick Naef, Divisional Senior Vice President, Emirates Group IT and head of Mercator said. “Change management and confidence in vendor support are critical factors to successfully adopt a new standard- this is why we chose Red Hat.”

The Emirates Group IT/Mercator supports a global enterprise of approximately 40,000 employees as well as more than 100 customers outside of the Emirates Group under the brand name Mercator. Consequently it has a complex IT infrastructure made up of a variety of software and hardware technologies.

The Emirates Group IT / Mercator strategy to migrate to JBoss was to first divert new applications for deployment on this platform. This allowed Emirates Group IT to quickly build capability, before applications were promoted to the production environment. The migration occurred seamlessly with Red Hat providing training and support to the Emirates Group IT department to ensure a more gradual adoption process.

For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Emirates Group IT / Mercator
Emirates Group IT supports a global enterprise of approximately 40,000 employees as well as more than 100 customers outside of the Emirates Group under the brand name Mercator. Consequently it has a complex IT infrastructure made up of a variety of software and hardware technologies. The IT infrastructure supports a diverse and complex business from the Airline, to Cargo Handling, Hotels, Travel Agents, Tours and Catering.

© 2009 Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, the Shadowman logo and JBoss are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

2009 RED HAT INNOVATION AWARD WINNER: MANAGEMENT EXCELLENCE AND INNOVATOR OF THE YEAR

COMPANY: Whole Foods Market

CATEGORY: Management Excellence

INDUSTRY: Consumer

GEOGRAPHY: North America

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Needed a cost-effective operating platform and complementary management solution that would scale with the company’s growth while increasing the security, manageability, and availability of business-critical applications

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Global File System (GFS), Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Consulting

HARDWARE: 75 HP x86 servers, 16 virtual servers

BENEFITS: Obtained an easy-to-use and reliable systems management solution that enabled increased productivity and reduced costs by increasing system administrator efficiency; Experienced increased performance and internal-user satisfaction of homegrown applications, including order processing applications.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Founded in 1980 in Austin, Texas, Whole Foods Market (www.wholefoodsmarket.com) is a leader in the natural and organic foods industry and was America’s first national certified organic grocer. In fiscal year 2008, the company had sales of $8 billion and currently has more than 275 stores, nine distribution centers, and more than 54,000 team members in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Since opening its first store in 1980, Whole Foods has experienced rapid business growth and success at both the national and international levels driven by the market’s desire for natural and organic products available in a friendly, neighborhood shopping experience. As the business grew and technology advancements were made, Whole Foods IT department began evaluating technology solutions and vendors that would enable cost-effective expansion of its IT infrastructure while simultaneously meeting the performance demands of its internal technology users.

The company needed a stable and reliable operating system to run its business-critical homegrown ordering systems and its middleware environment. The company also realized the need for a reliable management solution that would enable its IT staff to focus on strategic projects.

SOLUTION
After testing and cost evaluations, Whole Foods selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on commodity HP x86 servers to run some of its critical order processing and middleware environment components. It also selected Red Hat Satellite as its Linux systems management solution.

“As a cost-conscious company, our IT department is always looking at ways to cut costs without sacrificing performance. More and more of our leadership team is recognizing that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an easy way to do that. Take for example our other major UNIX platforms. While they are stable environments, the hardware, license, and support costs are prohibitive. With Red Hat on an x86 platform, it is a significant difference. In addition to the direct cost benefits, Red Hat Satellite’s management tools allow us to focus on strategic business initiatives,” said Bryan Pennington, senior systems administrator at Whole Foods.

Currently, with more than 90 servers deployed, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the largest UNIX operating system environment at Whole Foods. As the performance of the order processing applications and middleware are highly important programs to the internal customers, Whole Foods’ Enterprise Linux deployment is considered mission-critical to its business.

“Our order processing applications are critical to our daily business operations, and if these systems are down, orders are not put through, deliveries could be delayed, and products might be unavailable to our customers,” said Pennington. “With Red Hat, we have experienced the stability, reliability, and performance we expected and required, and have not encountered interruptions to our daily business operations.”

Whole Foods used the expertise of Red Hat Consulting to install and deploy Red Hat Satellite to manage its Red Hat systems. Built on open standards, Red Hat Satellite provides powerful systems administration capabilities such as management, provisioning, and monitoring for large Linux deployments. Pennington, a Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) himself, found great value in the Red Hat Consulting team. “Our Red Hat Consultant worked with us side-by-side during the installation, answered all of our questions, provided best practices, and has checked in with us routinely since the engagement,” said Pennington.

In 2008, Whole Foods began using Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS) to further improve system administration through enhanced system backup and failover services.

BENEFITS
Pennington attributes Red Hat Satellite’s reliable and easy-to-use management capabilities with cutting company costs. “Red Hat Satellite has allowed us to reallocate resources,” said Pennington. “We’ve been able to assign new hires in strategic business roles because Red Hat Satellite’s management capabilities allow me to manage all of the systems without the additional help. Help would be nice, but with Red Hat Satellite, it’s not as needed.”

The increased performance of some of the homegrown applications resulted in increased internal user satisfaction and the opportunity to grow the Red Hat technology presence at Whole Foods.

“Our internal applications running Red Hat Enterprise Linux are critical to our business and we have complete trust in Red Hat technology and support,” said Pennington. “Our decision to select Red Hat was the right one, and we have never looked back.”

With the use of Red Hat Satellite and PXE boot, new servers are able to quickly be provisioned, configured, and available for use by application teams.

The knowledge transfer with Red Hat Consulting was valuable to the Whole Foods IT team, as the information gained and best practices put into place have saved time and resources since deployment.

“Simply put, with Red Hat Satellite I am able to manage the provisioning, updates, patching, and maintenance of our entire Red Hat environment myself, which would be very difficult otherwise. A result is in cost benefits and resource efficiency gains due to our high Red Hat administrator-to-system ratio.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Banco Pastor

Industry: Financial Services Banking

Geography:Spain

Business Challenge: Improve payroll and human resource systems management and achieve cost savings performance improvements with an upgrade of the email infrastructure

Migration Path: From distributed platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 Business Class mainframes

Solution: The implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on IBM System z10 Business Class mainframes to run SAP NetWeaver, SAP ERP, and IBM Lotus Notes software

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server v5.3, SAP NetWeaver 7.0, SR3, SAP ERP 6.0 SR3, and IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration 7.0.2

Hardware: Two IBM System z10 Business Class mainframes, three and four IFLs

Benefits: The new email platform reduced recurrent costs by 30 percent, improved performance for IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration software and SAP applications, and guaranteed an exhaustive and scalable control of resources

“We have chosen Red Hat for the quality of its solutions and its outstanding technical support. Both Red Hat and IBM have clearly understood our project objectives, and together with Banco Pastor have been thoroughly committed to the proposal. We have built a very strong platform. We are delighted with what we have achieved.”
Montserrat Torres, computer systems manager of Banco Pastor

“Through the server consolidation benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 Business Class, customers like Banco Pastor can invest in innovative solutions that deliver important cost reductions and improve their services and security. The proven performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z allows Banco Pastor to increase their response capability and the availability of their business applications.”
Carlos Roldan, IBM System z Manager in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Israel

Download the case study[PDF] This story is available in the following languages: SPANISH

BACKGROUND
Founded in 1776, Banco Pastor has become the seventh largest banking group in Spain with 4,500 employees and 650 branch offices, and has presence in the US, Europe, and Latin America.

Banco Pastor is a bank focused on relationships, and closeness to the customer is a top priority in all their expansion decision making. The bank has firmly opted for new distribution channels, mainly telephone and the Internet, and it has an active presence in the Spanish market in both direct and Internet banking.

Banco Pastor occupies a prominent position in the Spanish banking sector’s rankings; it has the most advanced management systems and a highly effective and well dimensioned organizational structure, flexible and ready to take on the challenges of a rapidly evolving environment. In 2008, it increased its client base by 15 percent from the year before.

Banco Pastor has migrated its critical human resource and corporate email systems running SAP NetWeaver, SAP ERP, and IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration software to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Through a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10, Banco Pastor has experienced decreased annual IT costs of 30 percent for the platform supporting its email system, improved performance, and increased scalability for the platforms running its SAP and IBM Lotus Notes applications.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Banco Pastor looked to update its human resources management system. Banco Pastor desired a new operating platform that would help it to scale with growth, reduce costs, and provide flexibility for the infrastructure supporting those applications.

The bank’s email system, based on IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration software, also needed an updated operating platform base to provide the reliability, security, and efficiency needed to serve its professional workforce, as well as the critical internal applications that rely on the platform.

When making the decision for a new platform, Banco Pastor looked for a robust, reliable, efficient, and secure alternative to service the bank’s 4,500 employees and the internal applications that rely on the platform, as well as those that support mail exchange, both internally and on the Internet.

SOLUTION
From the various alternatives considered, Banco Pastor selected an SAP solution for its human resources management system, including its payroll, career, and training systems. As part of the overall IT project, Banco Pastor looked for a new operating platform that would enhance the SAP system’s performance, reduce hardware costs, and enable scalability.

Having previously utilized Red Hat Enterprise Linux on distributed platforms, Banco Pastor had great confidence in Red Hat’s technology, support, and ability to deliver reliable, secure, enterprise-class solutions at lower costs than proprietary vendors.

This positive experience, coupled with Red Hat’s close relationship with IBM and SAP, prompted Banco Pastor to select Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating platform for its business-critical SAP and IBM Lotus Notes for Collaboration applications.

Today, Banco Pastor’s new SAP and IBM Lotus Notes infrastructure is based on two IBM z10 Business Class mainframes running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 – one server with three IFLs and the other with four IFLs. Banco Pastor’s selection of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 reflects the business’s need for one of the world’s most sophisticated business servers, with the equivalent computing capacity of nearly 1,500 x86 servers, an 85 percent smaller footprint, and up to 85 percent lower energy costs.

“Our consolidation project and upgrade to the SAP system is a critical component of our business strategy, and we needed to ensure that we selected the optimal operating platform and hardware for immediate results and future scalability. We valued the close integration with Red Hat, SAP, and IBM, and with Red Hat’s service and technical support, we knew we made the right decision. The performance of our Red Hat systems has matched our expectations as well,” said Montserrat Torres, computer systems manager of Banco Pastor.

The SAP platform represented a completely new infrastructure for the bank. Red Hat’s scalable solution on IBM System z10 mainframes has enabled Banco Pastor’s engineers to maintain maximum control of the platform’s growth – a top priority for the company. Once the second phase of the SAP project comes into operation in 2011, the bank intends to expand its Red Hat environment and acquire new systems.

“Through the server consolidation benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 Business Class, customers like Banco Pastor can invest in innovative solutions that deliver important cost reductions and improve their services and security,” said Carlos Roldan, IBM System z Manager in Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Israel. “The proven performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z allows Banco Pastor to increase their response capability and the availability of their business applications.”

BENEFITS
The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IBM System z, and SAP applications has provided Banco Pastor with a significant reduction in annual IT costs, a strengthened ability to scale with continued business and IT platform growth, and the ability to manage resources easily and with optimal performance.

“With our Red Hat solution, we have achieved annual cost savings of up to 30 percent in recurring expenses. But more importantly, Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z has enabled our IT team to plan the resources required to manage the SAP system in a dynamic way, without having to increase the number of machines, and consequently to reduce the complexity of the platform and control the management costs,” said Torres.

“Red Hat provides proven enterprise-class solutions at an affordable price. We make our IT decisions with our business, the required performance, and the associated operating costs in mind. In that sense, running SAP and IBM Lotus Notes applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers maximum value to our business.”

Banco Pastor is one of the most efficient banking institutions in the Spanish market and has the best efficiency ratio, achieved through a meticulous management of its resources, including financial, human, and technical resources.

The benefits that Banco Pastor achieved by choosing IBM System z Business Class with Red Hat Enterprise Linux to implement its SAP and IBM Lotus Notes applications includes increased efficiency by maximizing its cost savings, increased control over planning the diverse environments installed within the company, and strengthened control over the platform’s growth, which is one of the bank’s top IT strategic concerns. Banco Pastor has also saved valuable manpower resources in troubleshooting time, allowing its IT professionals to work on other projects to maximize resources.

“We were able to implement Red Hat at substantial savings over competitive offerings and receive premium 24×7x365 support, and in the end all of the improvements will allow us to serve customers better – increasing satisfaction – while controlling mainframe hardware and software costs,” said Torres.

Reduced Costs By Migrating Its Web Application Platform and Building a Customer Information Portal on JBoss Enterprise Middleware

FAST FACTS

Customer: Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg)

Industry: Printing & Publishing, Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering

Geography: U.S., EMEA

Business Challenge: Establish a new customer specific portal to enhance its customer relationship and provide internal business units with valuable customer insight; Evaluate and deploy an application server platform for its Java-based environment

Solution: With the help of Red Hat Consulting, Heidelberg built an interactive customer portal using JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and migrated its proprietary application platform to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Software: JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle 10g database, SAP R/3, Autonomy search engine, Interwoven TeamSite 6.5 (CMS), Microsoft Windows Server 2003 64-Bit

Hardware: Virtualized servers and F5 Load balancer

Migration path: Proprietary portal platform and application server to JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Benefits: Improved customer web presence with a central portal that increased services and information available, provided ability to use applications based on open standards in order to interact better with customers, suppliers and partners, reduced costs, gained excellent support and continuous advancements of its portal software, and reduced vendor lock-in.

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BACKGROUND
Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg), the world’s leading solution provider for the print media industry, built an interactive customer portal, www.MyHeidelberg.com, using JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform to create an interactive site to enhance its customer relationships and provide a unified global brand presence. With the successful portal project, Heidelberg has since migrated its proprietary application platform to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, in order to reduce costs, and increase the performance of its web applications.

Based in Heidelberg, Germany, with development and production sites in seven countries and around 250 sales offices across the globe, the company supports around 200,000 customers worldwide. Heidelberg’s printing products and software enable its customers to print high volumes, quickly, at high quality and in color at an affordable price and convert the printed material into the desired format.

Heidelberg, with a global market share for sheetfed offset printing machines of more than 40 percent, develops and produces precision printing presses, units for imaging printing-plates, postpress equipment, and software for integrating all the print shop processes that produce everyday items such as brochures, magazines, folding carton boxes and product labels. It also provides general and consulting services ranging from spare parts and consumables to the sale of re-marketed equipment, in addition to education and training at the Heidelberg Print Media Academy.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Heidelberg launched a corporate-wide web initiative to develop a strategic architecture and customer-centric web portal, to strengthen customer relationships, consolidate information and services, provide easier access to information, and increase revenues through improved communications with customers.

“Previously, we had a solid web presence for our customers, but it was more of an online brochure and lacked interactivity,” said Mathias Berg, Director, Global Web Systems at Heidelberg.”

Heidelberg also anticipates the ability to lower its costs by offering more self-service options, reducing the effort and cycle time for developing and deploying new services and applications, and simplifying support and operation of its applications and infrastructure. It also wanted the new portal to provide its customers with a central and secure repository for sharing data and communication.

“With MyHeidelberg.com, we have created a unified, central customer portal that can be rolled out and adapted to local markets, thus increasing our interaction and providing us with valuable customer insight,” said Michael Neff, chief information officer.

SOLUTION
In order to further its edge in the market, provide customers with more features, and enhance its web-presence, Heidelberg decided to evaluate a number of proprietary and open source solutions for the customer portal project, MyHeidelberg.com, in addition to an application platform solution to set up and restructure its global web presence

“In addition to JBoss, we evaluated proprietary and open source solutions, but we selected JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform due to its ability to deliver an agile, reusable framework, coupled with the benefits of open source to reduce costs, and freed us from vendor lock-in,” said Berg, “Although we had limited open source experience, we made our decision confidently due to JBoss’ established technology platform, flexible architecture, highly regarded enterprise support, and the expertise of Red Hat Consulting.”

JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, based on open standards, was selected for its ability to meet the key requirements of the project, including: the ability to integrate seamlessly into the existing infrastructure based on VMWare ESX 3.0 and Oracle 10g, and the content management systems: Windows Server 2003 and Interwoven TeamSite 6.5.

The MyHeidelberg.com customer portal needed to be flexible and reliable in order to adapt to Heidelberg’s local websites requirements, while at the same time, it had to scale for a steadily increasing number of users, which initially tallied more than 5,500 registered users and has been growing monthly by approximately 5-10 percent.

At an early stage of the customer portal project, Heidelberg made the decision to work with Red Hat Consulting in order to facilitate knowledge transfer, have a closer relationship with JBoss, and to have access to the engineers and developers behind the open source technology. Heidelberg’s IT teams in the U.S. and Germany worked with Red Hat consultants to enable a smooth integration of JBoss technology into the existing global infrastructure.

“We had a great experience with Red Hat Consulting,” said Berg, “The Red Hat Consultants worked closely with our IT teams in the U.S. and Germany to ensure a smooth integration of JBoss technology into the existing global infrastructure, by mentoring our team, demonstrating product features, providing documentation, and ensuring our team was prepared for success after the engagement. We view Red Hat Consulting as a trusted advisor to our team.”

“The MyHeidelberg.com portal, based on JBoss, creates a true value-add for our customers, and has enabled us to grow our business and serve our customers in a better way. MyHeidelberg.com provides a centralized web portal with tailored information for each customer with one gateway, one URL, one password, and one login.”

After successful testing and fine-tuning, the production environment and infrastructure for the MyHeidelberg.com customer portal went live.

“We now offer our customers an interactive portal, that can be adapted to every local market and is integrated with more than 45 websites worldwide.” said Berg.

Through back-end integration with ERP and CRM systems, Heidelberg enables portal users to securely interact with their data, such as service information, view and retrieve brochures, product specs, and account data, easily through one gateway. Additionally, the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform runs on Windows Server 2003 and collaborates with a content management system based on Interwoven TeamSite 6.5.

Heidelberg decided to expand its collaboration with JBoss when it decided to migrate its complete internet presence, www.heidelberg.com, from a proprietary application platform to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to set-up restructure its entire global web presence.

“Based on our successful deployment of JBoss Enterprise Portal for the MyHeidelberg.com project, and knowing that we had a stable, reliable, and fully supported solution, we quickly and confidently made the decision to migrate our global enterprise web applications from our previous proprietary solution to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform,” said Berg.

BENEFITS
Heidelberg’s use of JBoss for its customer portal and web application server has resulted in; improved customer web presence with a central portal, reduced costs, gained excellent support and continuous advancements of its portal software, and reduced vendor lock-in.

“All over the world, the name Heidelberg is synonymous with state-of-the art technology, top quality, and closeness to the customer, so we set the benchmark high for ourselves and we expect the same level of quality from all of our vendors,” said Neff. “JBoss absolutely delivered all we needed, by providing high availability, performance and scalability. Due to the Red Hat subscription model, we realized signification cost savings, faster ROI, and freedom from vendor lock-in.”

The introduction of JBoss has helped simplify IT administration: with only one portal infrastructure to manage, one platform and one brand for the company’s Web presence, helping to strengthen the brand of Heidelberg. The new self-service capabilities provided by the MyHeidelberg.com portal give customers fast, convenient access to critical information whenever they need it, increasing customer satisfaction and the credibility of Heidelberg as a valuable business partner.

“In addition to the enhancements for our customers, the MyHeidelberg.com portal based on JBoss Enterprise Portal, offers valuable customer insight and behavioral information that is being leveraged internally by our marketing, sales, and product development teams, which will allow us to make informed and targeted business decisions and increase company sales,” said Berg.

The cost of developing and deploying new services and applications has been reduced now that Heidelberg has a simple way to integrate content and information into the portal; the IT team can index content and expose it through the search capabilities; and can manage single sign-on. Also, JBoss has drastically reduced costs, as the subscription model has freed Heidelberg from the cost-constraints associated with proprietary software licensing and support.

“We were especially impressed with the performance, product features of JBoss and the quality of support, advice, and knowledge contributed by our Red Hat consultants,” said Neff, “The JBoss Enterprise Portal and JBoss Enterprise Application Platforms went into production and performed extremely well, and this is a great benefit for our customers and internal users, who can now access their data securely and without restrictions.”

“JBoss was always willing to work with us, as partners, to ensure the success of the project,” said Berg, “A prime example is when we identified the need for a unique feature for our customer portal, with any other vendor, we would have had to develop a custom feature ,with no vendor support. But with JBoss, we discussed our need, and they worked with us develop a new feature into the product, that will be fully supported by JBoss. This kind of commitment and performance is something that I have never seen before, from any technology vendor.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Construction & Engineering

Geography: Headquarters and global operations is based in the Principality of Liechtenstein

Business Challenge: To migrate all SAP® business-critical applications from a
discontinued legacy UNIX environment to a scalable and reliable platform and to eliminate vendor
lock-in

Migration Path: HP Tru64 UNIX on Alpha Servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 on x86_64
commodity based hardware

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Global File System
(GFS), ATIX Open-Sharedroot Extension, SAP applications including SAP Business Suite, SAP ERP and SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), and the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform

Hardware: 185 HP ProLiant servers, the largest machines have 32 CPUs with 128GB RAM

Benefits: Eliminated vendor lock-in; achieved an estimated 50 percent overall cost reduction; increased performance by more than 100 percent; provided ease of management and reliable uptime; reduced electricity costs and carbon footprint; and provided the company with a long-term platform strategy that will help retain expert knowledge and enable the team to be highly responsive to the increasing requirements of a global manufacturing, sales and service organization

Download the PDF case study This case study is also available in: German.

“We migrated to SAP applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant servers after evaluation and testing. Since migrating, we have have experienced increased performance of more than 100 percent. We also reduced IT costs with a commoditized architecture. Having a tight level of integration between Red Hat and SAP support organizations gives us the confidence to continue along this path and further reduce our costs by migrating all of our SAP environment to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”
– Martin Petry, CIO at Hilti

BACKGROUND
Hilti Corporation, headquartered in Schaan in the Principality of Liechtenstein, is a world-renowned manufacturer of leading-edge technology for the global construction industry. Hilti’s high-performance drills, chisels, cutters, fastening, and measuring systems are used by construction workers around the world. The company’s sales and service organization of 20,000 global employees works directly with customers in more than 120 countries around the world, handling more than 200,000 customer contacts every day.

Hilti boasts an internal IT center, including its own in-house SAP solution-based landscape, and places a strategic focus on technology leadership and innovation.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
An integral part of Hilti’s company philosophy is to sell directly to end customers and provide outstanding service at construction sites worldwide. The company’s sales and service department make up two thirds of its worldwide staff. Besides high product quality and the constant innovation of Hilti’s engineers, the responsiveness and flexibility of its sales and service organization are the main factors that make Hilti stand out from the competition and have ensured the company a loyal customer base.

As part of a family-owned company with a philosophy of sustainable and long-term investment decisions, Hilti’s IT organization aims to meet business requirements with agility. Fundamental investment decisions in IT are made with two key requirements in mind. First, a technology or platform choice needs to be scalable to allow for growth, be able to meet business challenges, and adapt to changes the organization will encounter over the next 15 to 20 years. Second, the platform choice must enable Hilti to retain necessary expertise to manage and develop systems over as many years as possible.

In the early 1990s, Hilti chose to build its mission-critical IT infrastructure on HP’s Tru64 UNIX operating system running on Alpha Servers. With this decision, the company was one of the first global operations to migrate to a 64-bit operating system.

In 2004, HP announced it would discontinue development and support for Tru64 UNIX and Alpha Server. This vendor decision required Hilti to develop a new sustainable technology roadmap and select a software and hardware combination that would comply with its 15-20 year strategy for technology investments.

“We were experiencing a classic case of vendor lock-in and the expertise our team had built over many years was suddenly depreciating rapidly,” explains Michael Hagmann, head of Enterprise Server Technology at Hilti. “Trying to extend the lifecycle of the Tru64/Alpha platform was not an option, as we would quickly run into maintenance and hardware issues. We started evaluating alternative platforms with our previous experience in mind.”

SOLUTION
When considering alternative platforms, Hilti’s enterprise server team assessed open source software from the start. The process started in 2005, shortly after HP’s end of life decision. Initially, Hilti wasn’t sure if x86-based hardware would be capable of handling the large amounts of data and tens of thousands of daily transactions its daily business produced. But the prospect of avoiding vendor lock-in completely by building the new infrastructure on open source software made Linux Hilti’s preferred operating system.

Hilti’s enterprise server team had only three months to evaluate hardware and software alternatives before making the final investment recommendation to the Executive Board. A strong argument in favour of choosing Red Hat was that all of Hilti’s application vendors have certified their products to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which boasts an ecosystem of over 3,000 certified software applications. Hilti uses a broad array of SAP applications. Its largest and most critical systems rely on SAP ERP and SAP CRM, each with more than 5TB of data stored.

Hilti’s enterprise server team wanted to continue managing its clustered systems as one single “root disk.” An add-on called “Open-Sharedroot” from Munich-based ISV and consulting company Atix, which specializes in Linux environments and complex clustering projects, provided that for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“In the end, we had the perfect partners for our migration,” said Hagmann. “We had Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the possibility to continue working with a shared root cluster after the migration, plus the commitment from Atix and Red Hat to support our project from start to finish. A migration of this scale had never been done before anywhere, and many believed we would face challenges, but we were confident that the solution’s benefits and performance were enterprise-ready.”

As an SAP customer, Hilti wanted to consolidate, standardize, and expand its SAP software environment to improve its business performance and enhance its systems reporting capabilities.

“Our business-critical systems like SAP ERP and SAP CRM are all centralized at our headquarters,” explained Hagmann. “Our sales and customer service employees around the world rely on these SAP applications to be up and running 24/7, so migration-related downtime was not an option.” Hilti started with moving less mission-critical applications to the new platform in winter 2006/2007. SAP CRM was migrated at the end of 2008 and has been fully
operational and stable since January 2009. As the last step, SAP ERP was migrated and ready for production in May 2009.

ATIX and Red Hat supported Hilti’s migration with a dedicated Technical Account Manager and two members of support staff who had access to duplicate test systems at Red Hat and guaranteed quick responses to support tickets. “With such a large-scale, and mission-critical migration, we built our relationship with Red Hat early and our decision to utilize a Technical Account Manager saved a considerable amount of time,” said Hagmann. “ATIX and Red Hat’s dedication to making our lives easier and pulling this huge migration project off together was an indispensable asset to us.”

BENEFITS
With the new enterprise server environment, Hilti’s business-critical IT infrastructure is scalable and vendor-independent. A key benefit of the migration is that the knowledge about the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based infrastructure can be retained in Hilti’s IT organization over many years to come, enabling the company’s own experts to scale the systems to match future business needs.

“We migrated to SAP applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant servers after evaluation and testing. Since migrating, we have experienced increased performance of more than 100 percent. We also reduced IT costs with a commoditized architecture. Having a tight level of integration between Red Hat and SAP support organizations gives us the confidence to continue along this path and further reduce our costs by migrating all of our SAP environment to Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Martin Petry, CIO at Hilti.

“Considering that we lost a lot of know-how as our legacy Tru64/Alpha servers were switched off, it’s very reassuring to know that Linux and x86_64 processors will be around for many more years to come, independent of the fate of individual vendors or their product decisions. The expertise we have gained is here to stay,” said Hagmann.

The new Red Hat-based platform has additionally brought performance gains to Hilti. Its IT infrastructure is now capable of handling more computing requests with the same number of CPUs as its legacy systems, but now uses less rack space. Lower electricity consumption and a “greener” footprint of the IT infrastructure are additional benefits.

“Running our SAP applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has delivered significant improvements in performance,” said Hagmann. “And the servers are very power-efficient, which means cost savings and a reduced carbon footprint.”

A large portion of Hilti’s cost savings result from the elimination of software licensing fees with open source software. “While it is still early to determine the exact total cost of ownership as we’ve just completed migration, our estimates show that our cost benefits are likely to exceed 50 percent compared to our previous UNIX platform,” said Hagmann.

“As a company driven by innovation and passionate engineers, we’re very happy to have made this big step to standardizing on SAP applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and industry-standard servers,” said Hagmann. “Now we can benefit from faster innovation cycles of standard hardware and be assured that all the software we need, be it for the operating system or the applications, is actually available on-demand. This clearly gives us a competitive edge in our business operations, as the IT department is able to meet new requirements very quickly.”

If you would like to start planning a platform migration to Linux with minimal downtime and want to learn more about how SAP solutions on Linux could enhance and integrate into your current platform strategy, please email: mds@sap.com.

To learn more about migrating your SAP applications to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, please email: SAP@redhat.com.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware form bedrock for over 120 applications and high traffic web portal

FAST FACTS

Industry: Publishing

Geography: United Kingdom

Business Challenge: To replace inefficient, incumbent systems with a reliable and affordable standardised system

Migration Path: A number of different platforms, including Tomcat, to one standardised platform based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware

Hardware: x86 commodity hardware

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform including JBoss Hibernate

Benefits: Gained increased knowledge management, expanded stability, and reduced operational costs

“We are more than happy with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Our 60-strong development team are happy with the implementation and the operation teams understand it, laying strong foundations for the future.”
– Peter Hanlon, chief technical architect, Trader Media Group

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
AutoTrader.co.uk is the UK’s No. 1 motoring website, with over 10.3 million monthly unique users, who carry out over 106 million searches on new and used vehicles*. The brand is building a competitive position across all effective channels including online, mobile and magazine. (*Source: Auto Trader Audit, January 2009).

AutoTrader.co.uk is owned by Trader Media Group, one of Europe’s largest specialist multi-media groups and provider of market leading websites and its associated magazines, including Top Marques, Bike Trader, Truck & Plant Trader, Ad Trader, Motorhome and Caravan Trader, Farmers Trader – all with the largest reach in their sectors, through web visitors and magazine readership.

Trader Media Group operates in the UK, Ireland, Italy and South Africa. The Group is looking to expand on its winning formula: giving trade customers the opportunity to choose all effective channels to market; building the service and relationship with dealers and manufacturers; and strengthening its portfolio of automotive and specialist classified titles.

Trader Media Group is jointly owned by Guardian Media Group and Apax Partners.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Previously, Trader Media Group was using a variety of different platforms to support various applications across the AutoTrader website, posing a challenge to maintain in terms of cost, efficiency, and, in particular, knowledge management.

Trader Media Group recognised the need to replace these inefficient, incumbent systems with a reliable and affordable alternative. The objective was to standardise its system on one stack, streamlining the maintenance and support required for applications to run on AutoTrader.co.uk.

From a business point of view, there were significant costs associated with running multiple platforms. From an operational perspective, it also wasn’t logical for the operations team to undergo a steep learning curve to understand various aspects of the platform in order to address specific issues that arose.

SOLUTION
Trader Media Group evaluated a number of open source and proprietary solutions that could offer the flexibility and stability that its critical platform required. The team felt that proprietary applications such as WebSphere didn’t offer the full value at the cost-effective price that the organization desired. Trader Media Group needed a platform that could run Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and Hibernate on an enterprise level and at an affordable price, and it was a natural choice to select JBoss Enterprise Application Platform which integrates a clustered Java EE application server with next generation application frameworks, such as Hibernate.

The migration to standardise the AutoTrader website on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform began in 2006, and because AutoTrader.co.uk was a live site, the process was deliberately gradual. It took two years to complete the migration in total, with around 120 applications being migrated onto JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

The decision to undertake a gradual, low-risk migration was based on cost, resources, and the need to maintain a competitive edge. The AutoTrader IT team had a strategy of migrating the different applications and elements of the site and schedule of when specific projects were to take place. The alternative, which would be to migrate the site in one go, would have been a resource draining project for the whole team over a four-month period, stifling the continuous innovation and development of the site that helps maintain its position as the leader in the market.

The solution deployed included Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating platform and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for messaging and Web Services, which includes JBoss Hibernate, which is a high performance object/relational persistence and query service. The eco-system also includes core search technology from Endeca.

The Trader Media Group team developed a virtualised image, which means that it can quickly deploy new servers when needed. The combination of Red Hat and JBoss solutions allows Trader Media Group to buy, deploy, and redeploy additional servers at very competitive prices.

BENEFITS
Standardising on JBoss has resolved the issues Trader Media Group had with running different platforms. The combined Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss solution has given Trader Media Group a more resilient, high-performing, and stable platform and has ensured that any problems can be resolved quickly by the team.

Trader Media Group’s key consideration is supportability. It is crucial that the operations team can understand and support the software. Internally, the fact that Red Hat offers a combination of technology, spanning the operating system and middleware layers, through one complete solution from one reliable vendor offers value for its internal IT staff.

With Red Hat solutions, knowledge management has been simplified considerably, and because the new platform is open source, it has helped to build a strong community where staff can discuss issues and knowledge can be exchanged.

The resulting stability of the business-critical AutoTrader website is also recognised as an important benefit of the Red Hat solution. The availability, stability, and speed of the AutoTrader website is key to the company maintaining its leadership in the market. Users need to know that they can rely on a fast, accessible site that is available 24 hours per day, seven days per week.

Peter Hanlon, chief technical architect, Trader Media Group, said, “In Red Hat and JBoss we have acquired an integrated platform that includes all the core components required, such as messaging and Web Services, resulting in an enterprise-level infrastructure, out of the box. We are more than happy with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Our 60-strong development team are happy with the implementation and the operation teams understand it, laying strong foundations for the future.”

As a leading publication competing in a highly dynamic market, AutoTrader is constantly looking for new ways to both improve the users’ online experience and to carve out costs from its publishing model. With a solid open source architecture now in place, and a vibrant open source development community now established within Trader Media Group’s in-house development team, the future evolution of AutoTrader.co.uk will be built on the reliable Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

FAST FACTS

Company: SNS Bank

Industry: Financial Services

Geography: Netherlands

Middleware: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and jBPM

Operating System: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: Flexible and high-performance platform; fast, standardized development, cost effective, low total cost of ownership.

BACKGROUND
SNS Bank was established in 1817 and is one of the top five banks in the Netherlands with more than 3, 300 employees in 146 branches. It is part of SNS REAAL, a Dutch service provider specialising in insurance and banking, and provides consultation for private and business customers looking for smart solutions to broaden their financial possibilities.

SNS IT is a 300-person branch of SNS Bank that is in charge of the entire IT infrastructure and determines the overall IT strategy including the development, monitoring, and maintenance of the bank’s IT systems. SNS IT ensures the uptime and availability of the systems connected to more than 3,000 workstations, producing the more than 500,000 transactions on a daily basis.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
As one of the top five Dutch financial institutions, SNS Bank in the Netherlands made a strategic decision to use technology to empower its customers online by fully automating its business processes. The ability to automate its service channels required SNS bank to apply Business Process Management (BPM) techniques to existing selling channels by revamping both its public and internal process in order to provide its end users with an online, full-scale Straight Through Processing (STP) experience. As a prominent financial institution, the need for online STP was of crucial importance to its cost effective banking model in an ever turbulent and changing financial world.

In order to effectively move towards a full-scale STP experience, SNS wanted to align its goals to be continue to be completed via Open Source Software, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and BPM.

SOLUTION
In an effort to effectively target and increase processing efficiency by eliminated unnecessary human intervention, SNS Bank decided to utilize JBoss jBPM after its use with JBoss Application Server in 2002 proved to be effective. SNS Bank wanted to ensure that its customers were informed at crucial process steps since open communication has always being an important factor in customer experience. In the beginning of 2007 the first full scale STP project was kicked off, with the goal of putting new savings products online in the start of 2008.

There was a shift in component strategy in 2004 from three main commercial suppliers to one where FOSS components are preferred when possible. Open source is quite pervasive throughout the solution architecture of all current projects. Furthermore, the development environment and tooling used to implement this solution consists of almost only open source software. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the proven server environment, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is hosting the web services and jBPM is the business process engine, the SNS Bank has a powerful infrastructure for exposing the selling channels.

With the implementation of the JBoss Application Server hosting the jBPM process engine, SNS Bank now has a solution that consists of a web-based front-end that allows customer access to products and services. All customer communications are managed by a document management process that tracks both post and electronic communications. The various back-end systems are accessed via a web services layer. In the event that it become necessary to deal with exceptions or be required by law that human decisions be made in the course of a process, there is a web based interface that uses web services to add, modify or end a customer process. As of 2009 the SNS Bank has deployed multiple projects exposing many products and service processes to its customers.

BENEFITS
In the current situation JBoss and jBPM have proven to be both cost effective in terms of ownership and in terms of speed of deployment. Reliability has been improved, with absolutely no issues since it has been implemented. Having access to the JBoss technical team, the various online open source communities, and a support contract have proven time and again that the choice for JBoss was the right one.

As strategic products made available to customers empowered by JBoss and jBPM, SNS Bank is able to adjust easily to customer needs. Products and product lines can be introduced into existing business processes in a cost effective manner. The flexibility to combine extends beyond products, product lines, and selling channels to become a very effective tool to reach customer bases in a timely and personalized fashion.

Customer communication are now personalized and tailored to specific processes, products, and customers personal needs as the data generated by their behavior within the processes is documented. There have been very positive reactions from customers with regards to the speed, quality, and the level of detail in communications.

With an ever growing base of BPM process definitions it is clear that the time to market for similar products is much quicker. SNS Bank has projects with estimates ranging from one third to one half of the initial development hours put into initial projects.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Airlines/Travel

Geography: The Netherlands

Business Challenge: Renew, update, and unify the heterogeneous IT infrastructure created by the merger of Air France and KLM to create an affordable and scalable platform

Migration Path: IBM AIX and Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5; IBM WebSphere to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, SAP, KARMA, (KLM-Air France Revenue Management Application), Alfresco Document Management System, TIBCO, Oracle

Benefits: Delivered reduced costs expected to amount to approximately 11 million Euros by the end of 2011; a homogeneous, universal platform; an open architecture with impressive performance and reliable support

Download the case study [PDF]

“There is no internal discussion. The best product is Red Hat Enterprise Linux: End of story. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we work more effectively and productively and we save significantly on manpower and continuity.”
— Rene Matla, ICT production manager Linux at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines

BACKGROUND
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is a worldwide company based in the Netherlands. It encompasses the core of the KLM Group, including KLM Cityhopper and Transavia airlines. In 2004, KLM and Air France merged to create the Air France-KLM holding company, creating the second largest airline partnership in the world in transported passengers. It is also the world’s second-largest cargo transporter.

KLM’s core businesses are passenger transport, cargo shipment, and aircraft maintenance. Its cargo activities have been fully integrated with those of Air France since 2007. The two transfer airports are Air France’s home base, Paris Charles de Gaulle, and KLM’s home base, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.

In the fiscal year 2007-2008, running from April 1 to March 31, the KLM Group transported approximately 23.4 million passengers and 657,022 tons of Air France- KLM cargo. Today, the KLM Group has a modern fleet of 203 aircrafts, and employs 33,002 staff (FTEs). With more than 1,000 business applications, the company supports more than one million customers and 50,000 desktops. It maintains three datacenters located in Valbonne and Toulouse, France and Schiphol, the Netherlands.

CHALLENGE
When Air France and KLM merged in 2004, the unified company faced a heterogeneous IT infrastructure that presented a complex cost burden. Both of the airlines used a different operating system for their midrange systems. KLM was utilizing IBM AIX, while Air France was deploying Sun Solaris. Because of the tremendous prior investment by the respective companies in these IT systems, cost considerations made it difficult for the unified company to migrate completely to either Solaris or AIX.

In the face of its IT challenge, Air France-KLM chose to focus on a joint IT future. It decided to phase out Solaris and AIX and migrate the IT systems of both Air France and KLM to a Linux alternative. The organization wanted a more universal and flexible solution that could reduce costs without compromising on performance. It established the internal project BLUEhat with the goal of UNIX-to-Linux migration, including a middleware solution shift from WebSphere to JBoss.

“Linux is made for and by a large open source community. It is a proven platform that offers reduced costs in comparison to AIX and Solaris and allows us to purchase, deploy, and manage many Linux servers at a fraction of the cost of our previous solution,” said Rene Matla, ICT production manager, Linux at KLM.

SOLUTION
To gain synergy between Air France and KLM, the unified airlines began planning for a UNIX-to-Linux migration. “As there was no flexibility in our legacy solutions, we decided to open up our systems. The step toward open source was logical, and our selection of Linux was a very important move. Open source offered us the possibility to innovate from the bottom up with no vendor lock-in and significantly reduced costs thanks to less-expensive hardware and no licensing costs associated with Linux,” said Matla.

The airlines considered open source vendors SUSE and Red Hat during its evaluation of open source operating systems. The choice to deploy Red Hat was obvious.

“Red Hat is one of the biggest players in the open source industry and is a great innovator in the community. It has a worldwide network and a big user base. And its work, such as the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, is a very important and transparent part of the innovative open source model. Red Hat has a strong product portfolio, including both Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware solutions,” said Matla. “The support we’ve received from Red Hat has also been irreplaceable. “To us, Red Hat is a trustworthy partner. We chose a supplier who can cover as much of our portfolio as possible.”

KLM also selected Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware for both its mid-level and low-level web environments. KLM has one million bookings and 40 million customer check-ins per year, and 50 million hits per day on our systems. With more than 350 web applications covering everything from booking to check-in, including luggage handling, marketing, and customer relations programs, the KLM web environment is critical.

The migration is not focused on speed, but rather on steady replacement of aging systems as they approach the end of their lifecycles. “We just turn off something if it is at the end of its lifecycle, and then make the move to Red Hat. Our plan is to migrate slowly, and with each new release, we’re one step closer to homogeneity,” said Matla.

Currently, the airlines run a combination of three systems for its web applications, including AIX/WebSphere, Red Hat Enterprise Linux/WebSphere, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux/JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, with the goal of standardizing on the Red Hat and JBoss combination.

“During the past years, Red Hat and KLM have created a strong relationship and partnership that has resulted in the creation of the first Red Hat Enterprise User Group. This group allows companies like KLM to share experience, knowledge, and best practices. Discussions focus on technology and future needs to share with Red Hat, but also includes a focus on the procedures and organisational changes needed to best work with open source. KLM truly understands the value of open source,” said Robert Molijn, key account manager at Red Hat.

BENEFITS
By choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, KLM has significantly reduced IT costs.

In terms of manpower, the new team is 60 percent of its original size. Red Hat solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, have delivered heightened performance and the Linux environment has given the IT team more flexibility and more effective performance results.

“Also, we are extremely happy with Red Hat’s support and responsiveness to our specific needs. If we have problems, we discuss them directly with knowledgeable Red Hat experts. In a complex environment with a great number of suppliers, is it great that Red Hat is also able to help us with problems that can fall between two suppliers. To have a company on whom we can rely reduces the amount of complexity we must deal with. The process is smooth and gives us a reliable platform to build up our Linux infrastructure to its current state,” said Matla.

To gain further Linux knowledge, KLM’s IT teams have also invested in Red Hat Global Learning Services. “The excellence of the Red Hat Training program is that it is practice-based. As far as I know, it is the only certificate program that is so thorough. Somebody who is a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) actually knows how to run a Linux environment. He is able to solve certain problems in the specified amount of time. You also see this excellence in the quality of people who have gained the certification,” said Matla.

Red Hat customers also have access to the open source user and developers community, which is a valuable resource that helps drive quality products that are delivered rapidly to customers. “This could be the model of the future. You make it open to the community and you become less dependent on one solution provider. With Red Hat, we trust in this model and its reliable products and support,” said Matla.

Spanish Employment Portal Relies on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for key architecture deployment

Raleigh, NC– June 30, 2009 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that InfoJobs.net, one of the leading employment websites in Spain, has migrated its critical web business platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform with the help of Essi Projects, a Red Hat Premier Business Partner.

Infojobs.net now fully leverages JBoss Application Platform 4.2.0 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its application servers, indexing subsystem and database servers. Established ten years ago, InfoJobs.net runs a high-traffic web portal and has experienced significant growth. More than 5,500 users register their curriculum vitae through the InfoJobs.net web portal each day. With over 100,000 employment vacancies listed, Infojobs.net must meet the high-volume demand required by its users. Because of Red Hat’s significant value and fast run-times the IT department at InfoJobs.net migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for all its environments and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for its web and satellite servers.

“Red Hat and their partner, Essi Projects, provide the greatest value for our business model. They provide superior on-demand support which is exactly what we need,” said Gabriel Prat, IT manager, InfoJobs.net.

Essi Projects, a Red Hat Premier Business Partner, designed and implemented an automated procurement environment for the various development, production and pre-production, QA and testing environments. In addition, Essi Project engineers performed analysis for each of the InfoJobs.net systems creating personalized profiles for the installation and configuration, automated and unattended environments. One of the most significant improvements has been a reduction of the time necessary to prepare a server for operations, a task that now requires only a few minutes.

“The challenge of operating a website with completely dynamic content is enormous. Through open source technology we can offer our users smooth browsing with constant response time,” said Prat.

By leveraging Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, InfoJobs.net now has a scalable platform with full integration between application servers and the infrastructure level. Additionally, the deployment and maintenance tasks for new nodes have been simplified by adding a standard hardware wrapping, based on blade servers; the operations department can operate the application server infrastructure at full speed.

“We have a highly-skilled group of technicians and developers that enjoy working with Red Hat and the open source community,” added Gabriel Prat. “With the open source development model and Red Hat’s world class support we will be able to quickly resolve any issues that might arise.”

For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About InfoJobs.net
InfoJobs.net is the leading private employment website in Spain and Europe. Created in 1998, it employs a team of 200 professionals.

The portal offers 100,000 job opportunities in 10,000 companies and serves more than 180 million page views per month, according to last year’s OJD details. According to Nielsen/Netratings, InfoJobs.net was the leading employment portal in Spain in November 2008 with a 54% visitor share.
InfoJobs.net belongs to the Anuntis group, the Spanish leader in all online classified advertising segments: Employment (InfoJobs.net), Real Estate (fotocasa.es), Motor (coches.net) and classified (segundamano.es). It owns 27 Internet portals.

Anuntis is owned by the Nordic group Schibsted (76%) and the founders of Anuntis (24%).

About Essi Projects S.A.
Essi Projects is an Information Technology and Communications Engineering company, specialized in application infrastructure and system integration projects. It primarily develops its activities in the Iberian Peninsula. The company focuses on the execution of system infrastructure projects, specifically in the areas of operating environments (servers, storage, Unix/Linux systems), application infrastructure (databases, application servers and frameworks), information and collaboration systems (communication tools, portals), software architecture (J2EE) and security.

Essi Projects has on various occasions won awards from manufacturers and wholesalers for its work in the market. Some of these awards include the one received recently from Red Hat as Best Infrastructure Partner of the Year FY08 for EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa), highlighting the work of Essi Projects as a Red Hat Premier Partner and JBoss Premier Partner.

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for five consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending, the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. RED HAT and JBOSS are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the US and other countries.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Local Government

Geography: The Netherlands

Opportunity: Renew part of the city’s IT infrastructure and create a future-proof platform for its heterogeneous environment

Migration Path: Windows and Unix with small amounts of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, including virtualization and clustering

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization, Red Hat Global File System, Red Hat Satellite Server, Red Hat Consulting, Basis Registratie Systeem (BRS)

Hardware: 6 Dell 1750, 1850, 1950, and 2950 servers

Benefits: Run more applications with less hardware, enable cost- and space-savings, provide scalability, offer capacity to support future growth and deliver disaster-recovery capabilities

“One of the key benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization is that we can install and roll out a new application in 60 minutes to all of our systems, compared to four hours per system previously.”
– Hennie Stam, Senior System Administrator, DS+V Division at City of Rotterdam.

Download the case study [ PDF ]

BACKGROUND
The City of Rotterdam, known for its famous harbour and large city council, is located in the Netherlands and boasts over 600,000 inhabitants. The Maas river is at the heart of the City of Rotterdam’s economical development and is responsible for the shipment and handling of over 350 million tons of goods per year.

Rotterdam’s City Council operates a number of autonomous services, including Dienst Stedenbouw en Volkshuisvesting (DS+V), an organization responsible for town planning, housing, and traffic in the city. The City Council employs nearly 16,000 civil servants, with about 1,000 of these workers making up the DS+V division. DS+V’s IT systems are managed by the Information, Policy, and Procurement department, which includes an IT management team that is responsible for handling the entire IT environment, including the proprietary, UNIX, and Linux systems.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The DS+V IT management team first implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 in 2004 for a small number of specific Linux applications, but was primarily running its applications on a Microsoft and UNIX platform. In total, 40 Dell and HP Servers were running its Microsoft, UNIX, and Linux applications, 10 of which were Linux-based.

As the IT team began developing a new administration and registration application, called Basic Registration System (BRS), for Rotterdam’s real estate activities, the department initiated an evaluation of the existing platform that included the assessment of various alternatives, including Linux. The IT team was looking for a cost-effective solution and a future-proof platform for its heterogeneous IT environment.

SOLUTION
During its assessment of alternative IT solutions, the City Council of Rotterdam’s DS+V IT team ran a pilot during the summer of 2007 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, specifically using the solution’s virtualization capabilities. The pilot aimed to assess the benefits of virtualization for the organization. The IT team compared Red Hat and VMware’s virtualization solutions and discovered that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5’s virtualization capabilities best fit its requirements and was the most cost-effective choice in terms of licensing costs.

After a successful pilot, the IT team migrated its servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and began using the solution’s virtualization capabilities running 10 virtual machines on its 6 Dell servers. Key drivers that led the team to move to a virtual environment included the benefits of less hardware, greater independence in software, the ability to support future growth, and space and cost-savings.

The DS+V department of the City Council of Rotterdam additionally runs Red Hat Global File System (GFS) for storage virtualization. The clustering capabilities of the solution equip the IT team with the ability to eliminate the impact of the fallout of physical servers. It also allows the organisation to optimize installation and patching of applications, improve the efficiencies of SAN resources, and simplify back-up and disaster-recovery systems.

The department’s IT team also selected Red Hat Satellite Server to optimize the management and deployment of both physical and virtual machines in its network. Satellite Server enables the IT team to download and distribute patches and fixes to exiting applications, and advance the user and license-management capabilities in comparison to its previous solution.

BENEFITS
Red Hat solutions have delivered heightened performance and availability for the City Council of Rotterdam’s DS+V IT team’s IT infrastructure. “Performance levels are excellent and the availability is 100 percent because the machines are no longer dependent on the uptime of the hardware,” said Hennie Stam, Senior System Administrator, DS+V Division at City of Rotterdam.

The IT group has seen cost savings since migrating to Red Hat solutions. The new setup requires less hardware, which has decreased the size of the server farm and the space required for the servers. “With our previous solution, the high number of physical servers would soon force us to look for additional space to accommodate the new servers, putting more pressure on our budget,” said Stam. “Additionally, the DS+V has managed to save on energy costs by decreasing the number of physical servers since migrating to Red Hat solutions.”

By choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization capabilities, the DS+V, as part of the City Council of Rotterdam, has succeeded in saving on licensing costs. The Linux environment has given the IT team more flexibility in terms of testing and deploying new applications, and adding users to the network. “One of the key benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and its virtualization capabilities is that we can install and roll out a new application in 60 minutes to all of our systems, compared to four hours per system previously,” said Stam.

“We were dedicated to successfully and rapidly roll out Linux and virtualization across the organization. Therefore, we chose direct support from Red Hat during the implementation phase by hiring a Red Hat consultant to guide us through the whole process to educate the IT managers that are responsible for our Linux environment,” said Stam. “We are satisfied with Red Hat’s support and responsiveness to our specific needs. The process was smooth and gave us a reliable platform to build up our Linux infrastructure to its current state.”

Fast Facts

Industry: Education

Geography: United Kingdom

Business Challenge: To launch an extranet service that would be available to its external users of more than 35,000 examiners and moderators

Migration path: Proprietary, closed solution to a more cost-effective and flexible platform based on JBoss Enterprise Application platform

Solution:

Hardware – HP ProLiant Servers

Software – JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Alfresco ECM, Enterprise DB

Benefits: Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), including cost and efficiency savings of £250,000 per year, and freedom from vendor lock-in

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) is the largest of the three English exam boards. It is the leading provider of qualifications for UK schools and colleges, awarding 49% of full course GCSEs and 42% of A-levels nationally. In total, over 3.5 million students take exams with AQA each year.

AQA is an independent registered charity, with no shareholders, therefore all of its income is used to run examinations and carry out research and development to improve its qualifications and services.

AQA employs 1050 permanent staff across its offices, headed up by its Executive Board. The organization also works with about 35,000 teachers, lecturers, advisers and consultants who assist in setting and marking exams.

AQA is committed to using modern technology to enhance the quality and accuracy of the examination process for the benefit of candidates and is always striving to modernize its assessment process.

OPPORTUNITY
AQA needed a secure extranet service that would be available to its external users of over 35,000 examiners and moderators. This extranet would contain valuable and important documentation allowing users to mark exam papers more effectively, eliminating the previous paper based process of printing and posting.

Security was a big consideration as all examination papers and marking schemes were held on the system along with overall guidelines on marking the papers. AQA needed a secure platform that would not be openly accessible. It was also important that the new system allowed users to access a variety of documentation twenty-four hours a day seven days a week.

AQA had a system built around a more traditional, proprietary architecture that was too restrictive and costly to maintain. In order to reduce the costs associated with licenses, support and maintenance, AQA decided to replace all the proprietary software with open source solutions. This migration allowed AQA to benefit from an end-to-end open source solution deployed on open standards and at a value point that would allow AQA to continue to innovate into the future.

“We were spending six-figure sums every year on printing and posting documentation to examiners alone. We wanted to develop an extranet that could replace our paper-based manual processes with electronic documentation that could be easily updated,” explained Peter Morris, Programme Manager, AQA. “Prior to the implementation, we considered all the major vendors, but chose an open source strategy as it offered similar and even superior levels of functionality, security and quality, but at a tenth of the cost.”

Because of the high demand for AQA’s services the entire solution needed to be deployed, tested and put into production in just six weeks.

SOLUTION
AQA evaluated a number of open source solutions that could offer an alternative software delivery model to its existing closed proprietary solution.

AQA had an existing relationship with Red Hat and had been using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform for its servers for some time. Knowing that the same high quality support structure, value and superior technology development extended to JBoss Enterprise Middleware, AQA decided to migrate to the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as well. The overall stack proved to be far more cost effective than its competitors and significantly less expensive than keeping the existing legacy systems in place.

The solution AQA has chosen is based on an open source stack comprising Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, Alfresco and Enterprise DB, and will provide a strategic platform for future collaboration.

AQA used systems integrater Optaros to aid the smooth integration of the new open source platform. Optaros enabled AQA to create a customised user experience that focused on ease-of-use and utilised Rich Internet Application technologies to improve the overall experience. Optaros supported AQA in the adoption of an Agile Development strategy which reduced the timescale for development to around four weeks.

The extranet was initially rolled out to a pilot group of 200 examiners whose feedback has been resoundingly positive.

BENEFITS
Key requirements for the migration to open source technology were cost and efficiency savings. AQA calculated that it was 10 times less expensive to implement a solution from Red Hat than to extend the previous proprietary solution to this external audience.

Red Hat’s subscription model now provides AQA with increased value as it can consolidate onto a single subscription. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is reduced, and printing, posting, licensing and other ongoing operational costs are significantly reduced. By automating its manual process online and enabling users to update details themselves, they have improved accuracy and administration staff are now free to carry out other tasks.

As a result, AQA expects to save £250,000 or more than $340,000 annually.

The other important consideration was that migrating to an open source platform facilitated the rapid and agile development of the system, enabling two or more developers to work on different aspects of the project at the same time. This had not been practical with the proprietary technologies previously used and was another area where Red Hat’s solution helped the developers to meet the challenging completion deadline of six weeks.

AQA also utilised Red Hat’s expertise through its training and consultancy services to enable them to take the application stack and server to build a version that is ready to use and web facing. This had a significant impact in enabling the system to go-live within a very short timeframe.

AQA is no longer dependent on individual technology suppliers and now has the flexibility to decouple, plug and unplug solutions as and when required without impacting the whole stack. This has given AQA a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

The migration to open source solutions has helped AQA meet the commercial challenge of staying ahead of its competitors while improving the level of service for its customers, examiners and candidates.

Peter Morris from AQA commented: “The first phase of our project with Red Hat has been a great success. We will continue to innovate and grow the technology stack. The new system has changed the way we work and has had a massive impact in terms of cost and efficiency savings. Red Hat pulled out all the stops to deliver over and above our expectations. We are now looking to migrate further services to open source as it will give us the competitive advantage to maintain our position as market leader and stay ahead of our competitors.”

FUTURE
The first phase of the project has moved exam materials online for operational cost savings. The next phase will involve messaging capabilities that will help communication across the organisation. This includes adding more exam papers, marking schemes and even training material such as online demos and screen captures to further enhance the user experience. AQA would also like to implement a forum so users can participate in conversations and discussions, creating an online community to share thoughts and learn from each other.

Eventually, AQA’s plan is to open up its information to candidates and a broader range of teachers. This will require a system capable of scaling to hundreds of thousands or even millions of users; AQA believes its open source system will be able to scale to meet this demand.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Hosting and Internet services provider

Geography: Offices in Spain, France, and Portugal with customers in more than one hundred countries

Business Challenge: Unifying Linux distributions and offering customers a reliable, certified, and supported platform

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: IBM System x 3250 and 3550 servers

Benefits: Improved quality and reliability of the company’s Internet services, reduced the complexity of its IT system, and simplified its IT maintenance process

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BACKGROUND
Arsys is Spain’s leading Internet services specialist, providing domain name registration, hosting, housing, and online applications. With more than 650,000 domain names registered and more than 220,000 customers, Arsys holds the top position in the Spanish ranking of domain name registration and web hosting, and is one of the industry leaders in Europe. To reach this leading position, Arsys has won its customers’ trust by providing high-quality services while offering rapid and reliable solutions to meet its users’ needs.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Every day, more and more of Arsys’ customers demand Linux as the platform for implementing diverse technologies such as: databases, portals, web applications, etc. The company started offering these services in 2002 on a variety of Linux distributions, which included free distributions such as Fedora, without certification or official support.

In time, Arsys identified the need to improve its existing Linux platform offerings and integrate support and certification in order to provide its customers with a stable and high-quality service. It was important to Arsys to provide services to its customers that included a wide network of certified hardware and software solutions.

Furthermore, the frequent changes and the short life cycle of other open source solutions required large time investments by Arsys technicians, who also worked with nine different distributions, adding to the complexity of their tasks. This resulted in two main challenges. First, it increased costs and the technicians’ workload. Second, it generated greater non-predictable risks.

SOLUTION
Arsys decided to unify the different Linux versions used within the organisation under one sole certified distribution, thus facilitating the technological management of the platforms used in hosting services, corporate applications, and in certain internal company processes and services.

Additionally, by implementing a more stable and certified Linux platform, Arsys aimed to facilitate the work of its technicians and reduce the number of hours devoted to the maintenance of platforms. As a result, Arsys deployed hundreds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions, thus enabling the unification of the Linux platform offered to its customers.

Moreover, a large part of the company’s internal processes are based on Red Hat solutions, such as its domain name registration system, its MySQL databases, and its electronic mail. Today, most web applications that enable customers’ interaction with Arsys run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In order to ensure its personnel’s technical efficiency on a documented and well-known standard platform, as well as be able to guarantee its customers the most qualified resources to manage their technology platforms, Arsys opted to certify its technicians with Red Hat Training certifications, and to update their knowledge on a regular basis.

BENEFITS
By using Red Hat solutions, Arsys incorporated the support and certification that guarantees its customers security and reliability for its hosting services.

At present, approximately half of the customers using Arsys hosting services operate directly through Red Hat technology. More than 220,000 of the company’s customers benefit indirectly from Red Hat platforms because a large part of Arsys’ daily operations, such as the domain name registration system or the e-mail system, run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Through Red Hat solutions, Arsys has achieved significant improvements in the quality of its services and security, two vital requirements for the company and its customers. Stability of the IT system is crucial to Arsys’ business. Red Hat is capable of providing high availability, reliability, and expert technical support.

In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is certified by the industry’s leading hardware and software providers, providing an extensive ecosystem of certified hardware platforms and applications for customers running the Red Hat platform. With this broad ecosystem, Red Hat customers are provided with flexibility and freedom from vendor lock-in.

The stability of Red Hat solutions, combined with the possibility of automating many tasks involving the operating system, along with the expert knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux obtained through the company’s Red Hat Training courses, have significantly reduced the time resources dedicated to the maintenance of the Arsys’ platforms.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Arsys is able to deliver reliable Internet services to its worldwide customers.

Lower costs and increased sales with a comprehensive call center solution

FAST FACTS

Customer: PRO BTP

Industry: Insurance

Deployment Country: France

Solution: Unified Communications and Collaboration

Business Partner: IBM

Business Need: PRO BTP needed to improve the quality of its call answering service to better serve its members. It also wanted to find a solution that would reduce its communication costs.

Solution: PRO BTP engaged IBM Global Business Services and IBM Global Technology Services to provide a comprehensive call center solution, unifying call answering among the company’s three call centers. The IBM team evaluated all the alternatives then selected an Avaya Internet Protocol (IP) infrastructure using Text over IP (ToIP) and Voice over IP (VoIP).

The solution runs on a reliable, scalable IBM BladeCenter HS20 platform, housed in IBM BladeCenter (Chassis) and running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.

Benefits: The company has enjoyed dramatically improved call answering service with 90% of 5,500,000 annual calls answered in three rings or less, and lower telecommunications costs in a secure solution, with automatic backup if one site fails.

BACKGROUND
PRO BTP offers auto, home and life insurance, health services, leisure and social activities, and product savings for its three million members. It employs almost 4,000 people and generates annual revenue of €4.7 million in retirement services, €1.5 million in health services and €240 million in insurance and financial products. It is a nonprofit organization controlled by AGIRC/ARRCO (a French organization of employers) and employees.

BUSINESS NEED
To better serve its members, PRO BTP needed to improve the quality of its call answering service. Because member call traffic has increased from year to year and is expected to continue increasing, PRO BTP also wanted to find a solution that would reduce its communication costs.

SOLUTION
Working with IBM Global Business Services and IBM Global Technology Services, PRO BTP implemented a solution that aligned three call centers, unifying call answering among the centers. The IBM team compared the best Internet Protocol (IP) solution manufacturers, including Cisco, Avaya and Alcatel, and considered the different returns on investment (ROIs), architectures and migration plans before selecting the Avaya infrastructure.

The new call center solution infrastructure is built using Avaya Text over IP (ToIP) and Voice over IP (VoIP) products, including Avaya Convergence Solutions, Avaya Multimedia Contact Center Solutions, Avaya Self-Service Solutions, Avaya Telephony, Avaya Unified Communications and Avaya Virtual Contact Center Solutions. The solution is integrated into phones deployed at PRO BTP agencies and at the call center sites. The IBM team provided both the hardware and the software, deployed the solution and provided maintenance services. A Business Continuity and Recovery Services plan is included in the solution; if one of the three call centers fails, the other two facilitate business continuity.

Using the new solution, member information is automatically displayed at each of three call centers, meaning that service at each begins with a uniform knowledge of the customer. Additionally, the IP-based solution enables member callers to automatically connect with available call center employees skilled in the caller’s particular field of inquiry.

The solution runs on a reliable, scalable IBM BladeCenter HS20 platform, housed in IBM BladeCenter (Chassis) and running the Red Hat Linux operating system.

BENEFITS
With the new solution, 90% of the 5.5 million incoming calls per year are answered in three or fewer rings, dramatically improving the quality of PRO BTP’s call answering service.

By engaging IBM Global Business Services and IBM Global Technology Services, PRO BTP has realized a secure and highly available ToIP and VoIP infrastructure in its call centers. The new environment has resulted in reduced telecommunication expenses. And the real-time information available as a result of the new infrastructure has highlighted the impact of call center service on sales, with sales increasing by up to 20 percent.

FAST FACTS

Company: Educational Testing Service (ETS)

Industry: Education

Geography: International

Business Challenge: Roll out new, competitively priced educational products and services more swiftly while cutting costs. Build applications upon a base of infrastructure software technology that will position ETS for evolution into cloud models.

Migration Path: Vertically scalable platform to commodity software and hardware platform and proprietary application server technology to Open source technology

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Web Platform, JBoss Developer Studio, Red Hat Consulting

Hardware: Intel x86 systems

Benefits: Reduce costs and boost competitiveness by moving to a stable, secure x86-based platform for developing and delivering new assessment products to market more quickly.

With Red Hat products, ETS achieves the following benefits (metrics are based on the current server-hardware and OS support service cost at ETS:

• Cost savings (approximately 40 percent)
• Improved efficiency (approximately 30 percent)
• Improved technology management and standardization
• Improved leverage of development resources
• Better positioned for adoption of cloud computing and virtualization technologies

“We performed extensive in-house performance testing, talked to industry analysts and considered all other aspects of the operating system and application server, including the quality of support, market share and the software and hardware ecosystem. Once we took all these things into consideration, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss from Red Hat with support subscription were the obvious choice at that time.”
– Harikumar Rajappan, enterprise IT architect for applications at ETS

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
ETS advances quality and equity in education for people worldwide by creating assessments based on rigorous research. The nonprofit organization serves individuals, educational institutions and government agencies by providing customized solutions for teacher certification, English-language learning and elementary, secondary and post-secondary education, as well as conducting education research, analysis and policy studies.

Founded in 1947, ETS develops, administers and scores more than 50 million tests annually — including the TOEFL® and TOEIC® tests, the GRE® test and The Praxis Series ® assessments — in more than 180 countries, at over 9,000 locations worldwide.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
ETS is widely recognized as the world leader in creating and administering academic assessments that are both rigorous and fair. But in the early 2000s, ETS management realized that limitations in its IT infrastructure were impeding its ability to compete in an increasingly crowded and price-sensitive global educational market. ETS’s dependence on proprietary hardware and software, in particular, was standing in the way of its ability to maintain its position as the premier educational assessment organization.

“A lot of new companies with new technologies have entered the market in recent years, offering solutions that were very aggressively priced against ours,” said Harikumar Rajappan, Enterprise IT Architect for applications at ETS. “We knew we needed to embark upon a different technology strategy to compete effectively.”

ETS had previously used platform were costly and non-portable (the software enabled with vertically scalable features as well as the proprietary hardware required to run them), and also prevented ETS from bringing competitively priced products and services to market in a timely manner.

ETS wanted to heavily move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that would enable it to combine reusable modules of functionality to quickly create new products and services. It also wanted to be able to easily port its applications from one hardware platform to another. “We’re particularly interested in the opportunities offered by cloud computing and virtualization as a way of bringing costs down while improving the scalability, portability, performance, flexibility and reliability of our applications,” Rajappan said.

Additionally, having an utterly stable platform for its mission-critical applications was one of ETS’s top priorities, he added.

“ETS wanted to stay with highest quality and hence design our applications to perform with no error,” Rajappan said. ETS has developed applications that designed to enable instructors to grade tests in a standard manner to ensure fairness. More recently, it has introduced tests that students can take via the Web.

“These applications must be high available due to the nature of ETS services and” Rajappan said.

For example, if a system crashes while a student is taking an online test, the student risks losing all of his or her work. “This would be unacceptable,” he said.

SOLUTION
ETS decided to move from vertically scalable platform to horizontal scalable Linux platform, primarily for reasons of cost, and portability. It chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because the open source operating platform was established as one of the most stable and reliable Linux distributions on the market at that time.

“We performed extensive in-house performance testing, talked to industry analysts and considered all other aspects of the operating system and application server, including the quality of support, market share and the software and hardware ecosystem,” said Rajappan. “Once we took all these things into consideration, Red Hat was the most viable choice.”

Although ETS initially tested the open source waters using the JBoss.org community version, the company today mandates that all developers use JBoss Enterprise Middleware to gain access to Red Hat’s stellar support resources.

ETS is in the process of migrating a majority of its applications from vertically scalable platform and proprietary technologies to Intel x86 boxes running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

ETS has also migrated J2EE applications to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Enterprise Web Platform. In addition, the company plans to pilot JBoss Operations Network (JON) as a monitoring and administering tool for J2EE application servers to improve real-time monitoring and proactive resolution capabilities.

BENEFITS
Thanks to its new Red Hat-based strategy, ETS is positioned to compete aggressively in the rapidly evolving educational assessment marketplace. In addition to dramatically reducing its upfront investment in hardware and software, ETS is in process of using the Red Hat products to construct an SOA that will speed time to market of new products and services.

ETS has also achieved its performance goals with Red Hat products. When benchmarking Oracle databases running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and x86 machines compared to Oracle databases on SPARC stations running Solaris [Sun SPARC(4 CPU , 1.2 GHz) to Intel (2 CPU Dual Core, 3.2 GHz)‏], “we found that Oracle running under Linux on Intel machines delivered required performance and that the cost was substantially lower based on the support service cost at ETS,” Rajappan said.

Thus far, ETS’s management has been very happy with the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux due to the fault tolerance capabilities of the platform. “When you are running your application on a single 8-CPU Sun machine and it fails, you are in trouble,” he continued. “But if you are running it on four Intel x86 machines, even if one crashes, your application stays up.”

And given ETS’s interest in virtualization and cloud computing, Red Hat was the optimal solution. “It would be very difficult to move vertically scalable systems into the cloud, or into virtual machines,” Rajappan said.

Since ETS standardized its J2EE application development IDE to JBoss Developer Studio, the company has experienced improved resource management, application portability, security monitoring and patch updates. Since ETS migrated its J2EE applications to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Enterprise Web Platform, it has also found it much easier to manage application configurations, application deployments and changes in technology lifecycles.

“We have potential opportunities to increase our capacity with the same resources necessary to support deployment and production environments,” Rajappan said. “Now we can better leverage our existing development teams as the applications are becoming more portable within different development teams.”

ETS has also experienced improved technical support and cost savings through Red Hat Global Support Services and Red Hat Consulting, and is very pleased that Red Hat treats it like a true collaborator. “Red Hat representatives have briefed us on upcoming solutions, allowed us to tour their facilities, and provided insight into their product roadmap,” Rajappan said.

This knowledge makes Rajappan feel confident that ETS’s J2EE application architecture vision is aligned with Red Hat’s strategic direction. “Thanks to Red Hat, we feel we are on the right path to the future,” he said.

Copyright © 2009 by Educational Testing Service. All rights reserved. ETS, GRE, TOEFL and TOEIC are registered trademarks of Educational Testing Service (ETS). THE PRAXIS SERIES is a trademark of ETS.

Migration from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Notes

ARMONK, N.Y., May 21 — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced Gruppo Amadori, a wholesale distributor of quality food products in Italy, is rolling out Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based desktops running IBM email, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software to select employees.

About 1,000 of the company’s 6,000 employees access PCs to help manage the production, processing, and delivery logistics of its poultry products for customers within Italy and internationally. In 2009, some of these employees will move to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop client operating system and IBM Lotus Symphony, open standards-based word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.

For its collaboration services, the company is moving from Microsoft Exchange to an IBM Lotus Notes and Domino environment hosted on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The first users have moved to Lotus Domino and will continue rolling out to the entire company through the course of the year.

The benefits that drive Gruppo Amadori’s migration to Linux and IBM collaboration software are the lower acquisition and operational costs.

“Our strategy is to focus on Linux first and foremost, taking a practical and pragmatic approach,” said Gianluca Giovannetti, CIO and Director of Organization, Gruppo Amadori. “For us, the Linux environment is the right choice for very focused applications and is more cost effective than Microsoft.”

In the first migrations, the Linux desktops will run Lotus Symphony; IBM collaboration software including Lotus Notes and Domino, IBM Lotus Sametime and IBM Lotus Quickr; and a Web browser to access an ERP application.

“Linux on the Desktop is providing great value and cost reductions to companies at a time when they need it the most,” said Bob Sutor, vp of Linux and open source, IBM Software Group.

IBM Lotus Symphony is software comprised of three core applications: documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The software is designed to handle the majority of office productivity tasks that workers typically perform. Lotus Symphony supports Linux, Macintosh and Windows desktops and multiple file formats, including Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft Office; and also can output content in PDF format. For more information or to download Symphony at no charge, please visit, http://symphony.lotus.com

About Gruppo Amadori
Gruppo Amadori is a leader in the Italian food sector. Founded in San Vittore di Cesena 40 years ago, the company — with revenue of over one billion euros in 2008 — has 16 production plants and 32 branches and agencies. Underlying Gruppo Amadori’s success is its ability to manage all phases of production from the selection of raw materials, farms, hatcheries, feed mills, processing plants and distribution. Tradition and innovation are two elements that distinguish Gruppo Amadori. For more information, please visit, http://www.amadori.it/

For more information on IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/think

FAST FACTS

Industry: Financial Services

Geography: Slovenia

Business Challenge: Banka Koper chose to build its new online banking solution, Banka IN, on Red Hat’s open source platform to avoid vendor lock-in, enable in-house innovation, and because the Red Hat solution offered easy integration, greater efficiency, and better performance.

Migration Path: Proprietary Platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.3, including JBoss Seam, Alfresco Content Management System, and IBM DB2.

Hardware: HP BladeSystem

Benefits: Reduced operational costs, and enabled easy integration, faster development time, and in-house innovation

“Red Hat’s open source platform is the right solution for Banka Koper. It is in line with our business strategy to become independent of any technology platform and allows us to develop our own solutions and stay at the forefront of technology innovation,”
-Mojca Plahuta, director of Information Technology Division, Banka Koper

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Banka Koper is the sixth largest Slovenian bank based on revenue. It is part of the Italian financial group Intesa Sanpaolo, which has a presence in more than 30 countries worldwide. Banka Koper has 52 branches in Slovenia and 830 employees across the country. It serves more than 150,000 consumer and business customers.

Banka Koper is a universal bank, offering a wide range of banking services and products for households, small entrepreneurs, small and medium-sized enterprises, large companies and institutions. It processes over 45 million transactions per year. Approximately 87 percent of all the bank’s transactions are conducted via internet banking and for corporate customers around 90 percent of transactions are undertaken via the internet.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Banka Koper believes that online banking will continue on its strong growth trajectory. As a result, it decided to launch Banka IN, a new internet banking solution that offers customers a personal approach, more comprehensive services, and lower charges. Banka Koper is already viewed as the technological innovator on the Slovenian market, within the Intesa Sanpaolo group, and within the banking industry in general. By increasing the range of banking services it offers via the internet, Banka Koper aims to consolidate this position.
By developing Banka IN, a complete online banking solution, Banka Koper will be able to reduce costs,expand banking services and make them more effective, increase loyalty and reduce risks. Providing a secure banking environment is a priority for Banka Koper. As a result, a further requirement was the integration of chip and pin technology and card authentication within the Banka IN platform. Banka Koper is also keen to reach new customers, particularly of a young demographic, and strengthen its market position as a whole. The new internet banking project is central to achieving this goal.

SOLUTION
Initially, the in-house IT specialists at Banka Koper selected a custom e-commerce platform as the basis for the Banka IN development. However, after 12 months the team concluded that the development was too slow. The existing platform was proving too costly and inflexible and Banka Koper was disappointed by the poor documentation, lack of skills and experience on this platform in the region. The team took the difficult decision to shelve their 12 months of work and look for an alternative solution. Determined to develop in Java to avoid vendor lock-in, and to ensure Banka IN could be integrated with Banka Koper’s existing platforms and core business applications, they chose JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.3 which includes JBoss Seam and the reliable Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating platform.

Developing the Banka IN service using the JBoss platform also offered Banka Koper significant cost-savings and the ability to develop its own in-house solutions much more quickly. Banka IN was launched in October 2008 after 20 months of development. The solution is based predominantly on an open source stack, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform which includes the powerful JBoss Seam framework, in-house developed solutions and DB2 database. The Red Hat solutions run on virtualized HP BladeSystem servers.

BENEFITS
The speed of the platform’s development was impressive, allowing the IT team to finish the project on time despite losing 12 months of work following the switch to Red Hat and JBoss solutions. After laying the foundations, developers now have the freedom to develop customized in-house solutions at a faster pace. VoIP applications and Alfresco’s content management system runs seamlessly on Red Hat’s solutions, and new applications have integrated well with the existing architecture and enable better disaster recovery. The simplicity of the Red Hat platforms allows for easy and cost-effective maintenance. Compared to other software payment models, Red Hat’s subscription model has also proven to be significantly more cost-effective.

Red Hat’s solutions allow Banka IN personal bankers to be more efficient and thus spend more time serving customers. The feedback from the market has been positive. The Banka IN solution does not require any additional costs or applications and delivers flexiblity.

Also of great importance, Red Hat’s solutions are compatible with Banka Koper’s long-term technology strategy to avoid vendor lock-in “Red Hat’s open source platform is the right solution for Banka Koper. It is in line with our business strategy to become independent of any technology platform, allows us to develop our own solutions, and stay at the forefront of technology innovation,” said Mojca Plahuta, director of Information Technology Division, Banka Koper.

After choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat organised a workshop for Banka Koper’s developers in co-operation with its local distributor, Housing Co. d. o. o. Since the launch of Banka IN, Banka Koper has enjoyed a smooth deployment.

Banka Koper aims to secure 25,000 new customers over the next three years through Banka IN.. It also plans to move more of its services online, which would result in additional cost savings.

“Cost savings are evident with our new joint Red Hat and JBoss solution,” said Plahuta. “This is just the beginning of a success story. We have gained a lot of knowledge in the process of deploying Red Hat solutions and this knowledge represents an important asset to our bank. It will also reduce training times in the future and allow us to do more with our technology.”

SUCCESS STORY HIGHLIGHTS

BBP develops financial messaging applications that are offered to financial institutions on an in-house or service bureau basis for SWIFT, SIC, and other financial networks. BBP guarantees continuous interbank connection availability and 24×7 access to its IGTplus middleware. Given the sensitivity of the application and the underlying data, BBP required an application infrastructure that could meet its stringent requirements for security and availability. BBP chose Red Hat and Ingres technologies due to comprehensive functionality provided by the individual products as well as the fact that the products were pre-integrated, fully certified, tested, and tuned for performance.

This solution was also chosen because both Ingres and Red Hat are well known for providing 24×7 support and maintenance to enterprises around the world. Cost was an important factor as well. Deployed since 2003, the application provides software and services to hundreds of banks throughout Europe as well as other countries including the United States.

Download the case study [PDF]

More about Ingres: [Ingres and Red Hat]

CHALLENGE

BBP AG is an integrated software and solution vendor specializing in integration of interbank applications. Founded in Baden, Switzerland in 1984, BBP has been a subsidiary of New Jersey based Fundtech Corporation since 1999. Known as IGTplus (Interbank Gateway), the middleware created by BBP connects financial institutions to payment transactions, securities trading, and processing systems. BBP offers this middleware on an in-house or Service Bureau basis for a range of financial networks including SWIFTNet (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications), the trading, clearing and settlement systems of the SIX Group (SWX, SIC, euroSIC, SECOM) as well as FED and CHIPS (US Dollar clearing) and connectivity to Brokers.

In 1995, BBP opened Switzerland’s first independent ServiceBureau (SB). Today, BBP and its subsidiaries directly serve more than 200 financial institutions, making it the largest SWIFT SB in the world. With more than 100 active installations at approximately 50 banks and data centers, BBP serves more than 400 banks throughout Switzerland, as well as in Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Sweden, France, Singapore, the Caribbean, and the United States.

Product reliability, security, and control are top priorities for BBP. These priorities – combined with a company-wide commitment to long-term, successful collaboration with clients and partners – have earned BBP an excellent reputation in the banking industry. Committed to serving smaller financial institutions as well, BBP promises extremely cost-effective access to interbank services plus quick, easy installation without any significant investment in hardware or software. To uphold its rock-solid reputation, this ISV must be able to guarantee continuous interbank connection availability and 24×7 access to their business-critical application, along with unshakable security and low total cost of ownership (TCO).

SOLUTION

BBP’s IGTplus middleware is a custom Java EE application developed in-house using the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the Ingres Database. The integrated application development stack from Red Hat and Ingres enabled BBP to develop its application in an environment preferred by their developers, and then to deploy in production within the same environment. Developing and deploying in a common environment enabled BBP to further reduce cost and risk. “By using this stack, we were able to reduce overall project costs by approximately 30% without increasing risk or sacrificing quality,” reports BBP Chief Technical Officer Amir Housseini.

Our customers come to us because they want to reduce the risk and complexity of supporting multiple platforms, procedures, and standards required in a multi-bank environment – while lowering TCO, increasing security controls, and strengthening compliance reporting capabilities. Basically, they place their trust and the success of their day-to-day business processes directly in our hands.”

That is why BBP’s entire business relies exclusively on an integrated commercial open source stack comprised of Ingres Database, a JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “Ingres and Red Hat have proven, long-term track records of successful enterprise deployments,” says Housseini, “as well as world-class global support which is crucial in helping BBP meet its goals.” Additionally, BBP prefers this solution because the license-free economics of commercial open source provide the company with all the functionality of a proprietary solution at a fraction of the cost.

“With the Open Source development stack offered by Red Hat and Ingres, we can develop and deploy custom applications within the same environment. This helps us manage costs, and more confidently ensure performance, reliability, and security, because we no longer have to develop in a production environment, then deploy in another.” – Amir Housseini, Chief Technical Officer, BBP

Yet, the primary reason BBP prefers this integrated stack above all others is the fact that Ingres and JBoss are commercially proven, pre-integrated technologies that work together seamlessly. “Because JBoss is certified to work with Ingres,” says Housseini, “we know the technologies have been tested repeatedly and are guaranteed to work together. Without that certified level of assurance, we could not confidently guarantee continuous interbank connections to our customers.” Further, Housseini and his staff find Ingres to be a highend, robust database that features “solid” tools and “perfect” installation and documentation.

RESULTS

The first version of the middleware known as “IGTplus” has been in use since 2003, with a third-generation product due out in 2010. Available as an in-house solution as well as through an outsourced BBP Service Bureau solution, the mission critical application is used by leading financial institutions throughout Europe and other locations, including the United States, to:

-Access all interbank applications
-Simplify and streamline corporate payments
-Reduce TCO
-Increase security and control

FAST FACTS

Customer: Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach

Industry: Healthcare

Country: Germany

Solution: Enterprise Resource Planning, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Optimizing IT, Supply Chain Management

Business Partner: IBM, SAP, EGT InformationsSysteme

Business Need:
Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach, a hospital with 1,400 staff and an annual budget of around €100 million, wanted to improve both business and clinical efficiency. Users found that SAP applications were slow to respond to their requests, as the underlying database had reached its performance limit. The system could not be extended or developed, and the database had to be taken offline for maintenance.

Solution:
The hospital implemented the latest SAP applications and selected IBM DB2 running under Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the IBM BladeCenter platform. It also chose IBM System Storage and IBM System x hardware to support a new storage area network for clinical imaging.

Benefits:
SAP application and database response times have been cut by more than 30 per cent, and users gain rapid, reliable access to critical business data. Database maintenance can be completed online, avoiding interruptions, and a clustering solution ensures system reliability. The new SAN offers scalable storage up to 112TB, a tenfold increase in current capacity.

“Our 32-bit operating system was limited to 4GB of main memory, which was limiting our ability to improve performance. Running 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM blade servers immediately allowed us to increase system RAM to 16GB, and this alone produced significant improvements in performance.”
-Dieter Reichl, Head of Business Technology

Download the IBM Case Study: IBM Case Study PDF

Overview

The Lörrach region is tucked into the south-western tip of Germany, bordering France and Switzerland. Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach, based in the city of Lörrach itself, serves the local population with both in- and outpatient general healthcare. The hospital employs some 1,400 staff, with an annual budget of around €100 million, very largely generated by medical insurance payments.

The Lörrach region is tucked into the south-western tip of Germany, bordering France and Switzerland. Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach, based in the city of Lörrach itself, serves the local population with both in- and outpatient general healthcare. The hospital employs some 1,400 staff, with an annual budget of around €100 million, very largely generated by medical insurance payments.

Approximately 600 people require regular access to business and patient management systems. The hospital had been using SAP applications, supported by a Microsoft SQL Server database running on the Microsoft Windows platform. System response was slow and becoming slower, and the opportunities for database tuning – which required downtime – were limited. Additionally, healthcare legislation requires that medical records and images are retained for 30 years, contributing to a significant rise in storage needs.

Dieter Reichl, Head of Business Technology, comments, “The aim was to introduce the latest SAP applications, which would enhance our business processes and give us new reporting and control capabilities. The existing system landscape would not be capable of supporting the new applications.

“Ultimately this was a technical issue. Based on the 32-bit Microsoft Windows Server operating system, the MS SQL database had reached its performance limit. To meet our business needs, we wanted to shift to a 64-bit operating system and database, and looked for the best combination of software and hardware to give us high performance, high reliability and low operational cost.”

Choosing a SAP application landscape

Starting with the target SAP applications, the clinic selected the SAP for Healthcare solution portfolio, with the addition of specific financial accounting, asset management, materials management, project systems and project management applications.

“The SAP applications provide a powerful environment for all our hospital operations,” says Dieter Reichl. “We track every patient, procedure and process within the SAP ERP landscape. With a shared information resource for all our activities, the SAP applications help us to run a highly efficient healthcare service for the citizens of the Lörrach district.”

Knowing that database performance, scalability and reliability would be key to providing effective service to clinicians and managers, Dieter Reichl selected IBM DB2.

“DB2 offers key advantages for the hospital, particularly its close integration with SAP applications, its ability to complete administration tasks online, and its very high performance,” says Dieter Reichl. “The exceptional price-performance combination offered by DB2 met our desire to reduce operational costs, and simple administration means there is no need to employ a specialist database administrator.

“The migration process ran smoothly and efficiently, and we found that we needed very little training to transfer to the new DB2 environment.”

“The price-performance ratio lead us to the decision to select DB2. In addition, we have no time for reorganization runs of the database, which is not possible in our environment, and DB2 is able to handle these runs even during production.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on BladeCenter

Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach looked at possible 64-bit operating systems, including Windows Server, UNIX and Linux, and selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The next stage was to select suitable infrastructure, capable of delivering the promised improvements and offering a stable long-term solution.

The hospital chose to deploy an IBM BladeCenter with HS21 blade servers, featuring quad-core Intel Xeon processors, to support the SAP applications and DB2 database. IBM BladeCenter offers integrated servers, storage and networking systems in a single chassis. The BladeCenter’s future-proof design, with the emphasis on high availability, is the right solution for meeting the challenging demands of the hospital’s IT infrastructure.

“Our 32-bit operating system was limited to 4GB of main memory, which was limiting our ability to improve performance. Running 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM blade servers immediately allowed us to increase system RAM to 16GB, and this alone produced significant improvements in performance,” says Dieter Reichl. “We run the servers in a cluster, and the BladeCenter approach allows us to increase total compute capacity quickly and easily by adding another blade server to the cluster with minimum physical deployment effort.”

Implementation was completed in partnership with EGT, a division of DataGroup. Server clustering, using Veritas Cluster Server, ensures that should an application or physical server fail, the environment can be restarted on an available server and reconnected to storage and services – so users can continue working.

“The collaboration with EGT and Veritas was very good, and IBM completed the database migration effectively. The transfer to the new systems was completed on time and without a hitch,” says Dieter Reichl.

Medical imaging database

Medical images generated by x-ray, CT and similar scanning techniques, are retained in a separate database. Image storage and retrieval requests are generated by clinicians using the SAP patient management applications, and slow response time was becoming a significant source of frustration. Healthcare legislation requires 30-year retention of patients’ medical records and associated images, which means that image data could not be deleted to reduce storage needs or increase performance.

With some 12TB of live and archived images, existing storage systems were struggling to deliver image requests rapidly and reliably. The hospital replaced its direct-attached storage servers with a new storage area network (SAN), based on an IBM System Storage DS4700 Express, controlled by two IBM System x servers.

“The DS4700 offers very high performance, and total capacity of up to 112TB – almost ten times more than our current needs. It offers very cost-effective expansion opportunities, and is helping us meet our legal requirements with reliable, secure data retention.”

Improved performance and reliability

The new, fully integrated SAP and IBM solutions are already proving their worth at Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach. Clinicians and business users report that system response times have halved or are even faster. The Red Hat Linux cluster ensures that the SAP applications and DB2 database is always available, essential to hospital efficiency.

“Using SAP applications we have a fully integrated performance monitoring and communications system, and some 90 per cent of departments and services rely on this solution. Operating theatres, endoscopy and x-ray – and of course patients – all depend on IT reliability and performance, and without it the hospital stops working.”

Dieter Reichl concludes, “The SAP and IBM solution brings us low costs and high reliability, perfect for critical healthcare at Kliniken des Landkreises Lörrach.”

Armonk, NY, and Raleigh, NC. 22 April 2009: IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), a leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Handelsbanken, one of the four largest banks in the Nordic Area, has achieved strong business continuity, security and cost-efficiency results by deploying virtualization technology using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on System z servers and IBM System z operating system, z/OS. The bank’s newly deployed technology solution will help maintain a highly resilient and secure network that scales based on business demands.

Today’s announcement comes at a pivotal time for Handelsbanken as the bank continues its path as one of Europe’s most innovative lending organizations with Internet banking features, such as unique branch office web sites and direct email addresses to each branch site for enhanced customer service. Handelsbanken joins the world’s top 50 banks that currently call upon the IBM System z server to run their banking transactions.

“Customers entrust us with their hard earned savings so it’s paramount that we select one of the industry’s most powerful and secure servers – the IBM System z,” said Roger Rydberg, technical manager at Handelsbanken. “System z servers are ‘almost perfect’ because of its availability and performance. It allows us to keep up with business climate changes because we can add or eliminate capacity any time based on customer demands. We can even make changes easily without having to stop any services.”

“One of the main reasons for us to standardize our Linux environment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the ability to lower costs and use our IT personnel more effectively by leveraging the solution’s integrated virtualization functionality. We can now fully harness and utilize the knowledge and experience of our IT staff who manage our existing distributed Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems for our System z environment,” said Peter ter Laag, Central Data Department at Handelsbanken.

The bank’s virtualized environment has helped to lower costs by minimizing the need for additional systems that require more energy and space, translating into a greener IT infrastructure. The combination of Red Hat and IBM solutions has helped the bank move closer to meeting its greener computing initiatives.

To maintain business operations for Handelsbanken’s 660 branch offices across Sweden, Great Britain and the Nordic countries to run smoothly, the bank utilizes Parallel Sysplex IBM’s System z clustering technology and IBM’s availability and disaster recovery solution branded as GDPS (Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex). Parallel Sysplex and GDPS together allows Handelsbanken to run its System z mainframes as highly powerful “clustered” servers that move new work requests to the available resources so that even planned or un-planned outages in multiple and distant data centers have little to no impact on business operations. Known for its ability to share system resources with one of the highest degrees of efficiency among other systems, the System z mainframe can consolidate hundreds of virtual servers into a single mainframe – allowing customers like Handelsbanken to run critical customer transactions in the midst of executing other strategic IT projects. Handelsbanken currently runs GDPS version 3.5. IBM most recently released Version 3.6.

In addition to standardizing its Linux systems on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its virtualization technology and benefits of scalability, performance and reduced costs, Handelsbanken also utilizes the System z operating system, z/OS, to perform ongoing simplification features and health-checking mechanisms. The bank’s infrastructure also includes extensive use of innovative policy-based networking services across multiple z/OS-based networks. Built-in automated reporting capabilities help Handelsbanken manage countless workloads and network traffic across its systems. Handelsbanken currently runs z/OS version 1.10, the latest release of the operating system.

“Most important for Handelsbanken is that we can achieve all the benefits of virtualized systems, while still maintaining a secure and flexible environment with high availability and reliability through Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These elements are extremely important to our business, especially when running transaction-intensive applications. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on System z has helped us meet mission-critical needs for our organization,” said ter Laag.

For more information about IBM System z mainframes, please visit www.ibm.com/systems/z.

For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com.

For more press, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

For more information about Handelsbanken, please visit www.handelsbanken.se.

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for five consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending, the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

###

LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. RED HAT and JBOSS are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the US and other countries.

Experiences heightened flexibility, stability, cost savings and ease of management with Red Hat solutions

RALEIGH, NC – 3 December 2008 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Scania, the leading Swedish manufacturer of heavy trucks and buses, has expanded its use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated server and storage virtualisation capabilities. The company utilises the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform for its critical systems, including specific infrastructure services, databases, applications and high-performance computing (HPC) servers to leverage the solution’s compelling benefits, including cost savings, stability, flexibility and ease of management.

With its virtualised Linux environments, Scania is achieving shortened time-to-services and increased flexibility. Scania can now perform system maintenance by shutting down servers in a structured process, enabling preserved stability and reliability. Throughout the rest of its virtualised Linux infrastructure, Scania also has the option of leveraging the solution’s included Live Migration functionality, allowing for the transfer of virtual systems between physical machines in the network to reduce the hardware requirements necessary to maintain the same workload.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform replaces some proprietary Unix dialects in Scania’s infrastructure with an open platform without lock-in to a specific vendor. We are now building a cost-efficient, flexible and stable infrastructure on top of the Red Hat platform, and have maintained high security and stability throughout the process,” said Mikael Åhlqvist, service team responsible for Unix at Scania. “The virtualisation capabilities provided by Red Hat play a key role in our platform. The solution has provided cost and time savings by reducing the necessary number of physical servers and decreasing the need for related maintenance, administration and energy consumption.”

In addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with built-in virtualisation, Scania is utilising Red Hat Network Satellite to retain in-house control over management and administration of its Red Hat-based systems. With Red Hat Satellite Server, Scania has access to Red Hat Network updates and has the ability to maintain local control over the management, administration and monitoring of its systems.

“We see benefits provided by Red Hat’s open source solutions, particularly in regard to its virtualisation capabilities and its subscription business model. Red Hat centers its business focus on delivering valuable ROI to its customers, and we are experiencing this valuable return today. We are continuously exploring the option of migrating additional systems to open source, and specifically Red Hat,” said Åhlqvist.

For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Web site at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

###

LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. RED HAT and JBOSS are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the US and other countries.

Online bank selects JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for web applications

MILAN, ITALY, 10 February 2009 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that IWBank, an organization focused on financial services and online banking, has selected JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the JBoss Operations Network to improve the efficiency of its web-banking applications.

IWBank is committed to providing integrated online financial services that guarantee high efficiency, safety and transparency levels, in addition to offering competitive terms and excellent service to its customers. In late 2008, IWBank decided to extend its collaboration with Red Hat, which provides the bank with open source solutions, by adopting the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to develop its web applications.

IWBank’s goal was to effectively address growing customer demands to conduct increasingly complex and steadily growing volumes of transactions.

“Application performance, affordability and speed is a real competitive advantage in our business. As such, all our applications are developed in-house by a team of highly skilled professionals. We need to constantly innovate and enhance our services, which led us to evaluate the platforms we use for development and choose JBoss. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is the best middleware platform to meet our needs”, said Massimo Pavan, Director ICT and Technologies, IWBank. “JBoss enables us to provide more and more efficient and affordable services, which is crucial in the current economic climate”.

“We’re very pleased to have signed this deal with IWBank”, said Gianni Anguilletti, country sales manager, Red Hat Italy. “It emphasizes two core features of Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware: first, the high functional value of our technologies, which can fulfill sophisticated and complex needs. Second, the deal with IWBank represents further proof of how Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise solutions are providing valuable support for businesses facing difficult economic conditions”.

IWBank was the first bank to simplify the management of free online bank accounts combined with deposit accounts. It was selected as the Best Online Bank 2008 by Of-Osservatorio Finanziario (a prominent independent institute for bank services monitoring and rating).

For more information about Red Hat and JBoss, please visit, www.redhat.com and www.jboss.com.

About IWBank
IW BANK S.p.A. is part of UBI Banca Group, the fourth largest banking Group in Italy.
Active in the online trading sector since November 1999 as @IMIWEB Sim S.p.A., it has progressively expanded its offer since 2001, after its transformation into a bank, presenting itself as a reference operator in the online financial services sector. Since 23 May 2007, IWBank has been a public company, listed on the Expandi Market of the Italian Stock Exchange “Borsa Italiana”.

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for five consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

#

LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. RED HAT and JBOSS are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the US and other countries.N

FAST FACTS

Partner: Tapasol Solutions

Customer: ServusNet Informatics

Industry: Technology

Geography: Cork, Ireland

Business Challenge: Simplify the deployment of ServusNet Informatics’ Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based Process Driven Operations & Maintenance solution at remote customer sites using Tapasol’s provisioning engine based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Migration Path: Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization on Dell x86 servers

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with built-in virtualization, JBoss Application Server, Liferay Portal, Oracle DB

Hardware: Dell x86 servers

Benefits: Increased deployment speed of ServusNet Informatics’ Process Driven Operations & Maintenance solution; reduced costs of implementing virtualization technology; continuing enhancement to the productivity of developers working on leading-edge Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based software products

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux with integrated virtualization capabilities was easy and more cost-effective to implement than other solutions on the market. We reduced the effort it took to provision a server by 92 percent. As the engine underlying both our and Tapasol’s solutions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is making a significant contribution to our ability to offer a competitive product.””
-Sean Condon, Director of Product Development, ServusNet Informatics

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
ServusNet Informatics is an innovative Irish company delivering a Process Driven Operations & Maintenance solutions for the Distributed Generation industry. ServusNet believes that a tipping point has been reached for a broad range of enabling technologies for management solutions. This will allow more sophisticated, targeted, and cost-effective solutions to be delivered to a wide range of customers. ServusNet’s flagship product applies a process-driven approach to operations and maintenance, giving companies a way to improve operational efficiency of Renewable Energy and Distributed Generation assets as well as diagnose and identify bottlenecks and inconsistencies in their existing processes.

Tapasol is a Red Hat ISV partner and leading provider of automated software provisioning solutions, for both the Solaris and Linux server markets. Created in 2007, specifically with the goal of helping customers reduce their costs when deploying software solutions on Solaris and Linux servers, Tapasol’s innovative provisioning framework enables customers to build and provision servers with software – including operating systems, databases, and other third-party products – from a single media source, with minimal operator interaction.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
ServusNet Informatics was founded with the belief that huge productivity gains are possible by guiding Operations & Maintenance tasks with well-defined processes, and ensuring that those processes are consistently followed by all stakeholders. In late 2008, the company planned to release its first product – a Linux- and J2EE-based process management system – but senior managers became concerned about the complexity of installing the application at remote customer sites.

“We have to balance the technical support team between building servers out and further development of the support services,” said Sean Condon, director of product development for ServusNet Informatics. The company had two basic choices: either send highly technical personnel out to client sites to install the software – a costly proposition – or hope that customers could do it themselves if guided by comprehensive documentation. “Neither solution was optimal,” said Condon.

SOLUTION
Hoping to automate the deployment process, ServusNet Informatics examined the market for available third-party provisioning solutions. “We’re a software development house, and we did not want to invest resources in configuring boxes,” said Condon. “Our talent and skills are best served concentrating on our core business.”

Given that ServusNet Informatics had built its software using JBoss Application Server, Liferay Portal and Oracle DB running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the Tapasol solution was the perfect match.

Tapasol soon discovered that demand for its Linux-based product was much stronger than for its Solaris one, and “of all the Linux distributions out there, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is by far the most popular,” said Brendan Fidgeon, chief technology officer at Tapasol. “At least 70 percent of our Linux customers use Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” he said.

For ServusNet Informatics, using Red Hat Enterprise Linux was not a choice, but an imperative given technological as well as market conditions. “Coming from the telecom world, most of our experience and previous work had been on Solaris,” said Condon. “But after thinking about it long and hard, we realized that in our market there was greater recognition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux than other UNIX systems, like Solaris.”

What clinched the Red Hat decision: the fact that it supported so many third-party products. “When we started building our software, we knew we would use three major components: the Liferay Web-based portal; JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, and a mediation framework that we’d brought over from the telecom world,” said Condon.

“Liferay supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux; all the scripts in the mediation framework ran on Red Hat Enterprise Linux; and of course JBoss is a division of Red Hat, and so there was a synergy there, that we hope to capitalize on too,” said Condon, “A nice side effect is that Dell Open Manage application which we use for monitoring the Dell servers we recommend is fully supported on Red Hat. We just put everything on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the decision, in retrospect, has worked out well.”

Another of ServusNet Informatics’ requirements was support for virtualized hosting of their product – and Tapasol was able to support this need. “Since so many of our customers possess virtualized servers, we needed to be able to set up our product on both bare metal and on virtualized systems,” said Fidgeon. Because the Tapasol solution leverages the para-virtualization capabilities available with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, this was a major selling point for that product from ServusNet Informatics’ perspective.

BENEFITS
Both ServusNet Informatics and Tapasol reaped significant benefits from building their products using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

For ServusNet, the benefits came down to ease of use and cost. “Running our Solaris solution on the SPARC architecture is complex, and support of Solaris on the Dell x86 systems we use is sometimes less than 100 percent,” said Condon. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs flawlessly on these Dell x86 servers, and the support is excellent.” One of the reasons most of its customers had standardized on Red Hat Enterprise Linux was that more hardware and software vendors supported it, and the development environment itself was so rich that they didn’t have buy supplemental compilers and other tools to make it work. Plus, “our people found the Red Hat professionals very easy to get along with – it is a very compatible culture to ours,” he said.

According to Tapasol, one of the key benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is that it delivers a completely integrated virtualized environment, including features like Live Migration and Resource Management, at no added cost. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization capabilities was much easier and more cost-effective to implement than the other virtualization solutions on the market,” said Fidgeon.

ServusNet Informatics, which had itself considered using VMware to host its virtualized solution in its own labs, estimated that it reduced virtualization costs by 75 percent by selecting with Red Hat’s leading open virtualization solution. “We’re talking significant savings for the same or even better functionality and performance,” said Condon.

By utilizing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based Tapasol provisioning engine, ServusNet Informatics no longer needs to worry about sending engineers onsite, or about customers’ technical capabilities.

“We reduced the effort it took to provision a server by 92 percent,” said Condon. “This is a real advantage, because we need to get machines up and running very quickly when we sign on a new customer. As the engine underlying both our and Tapasol’s solutions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is making a significant contribution to our ability to offer a competitive product.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Real Estate

Geography: Germany

Business Challenge: Dramatically reduce energy use and operating costs while improving overall performance and manageability of servers and maintaining zero downtime

Migration Path: 32-bit Windows server environment to 64-bit server environment based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with built-in virtualization technology

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, Red Hat Global Support Services

Hardware: HP Blade Systems

Benefits: Reduced energy usage by 25 percent and hardware cost per server by 60 percent, carved out operations costs by 10 percent with streamlined systems management, achieved full return on investment for the project within three months, and maintains consistent zero downtime

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BACKGROUND
ImmobilienScout24.de is one of the most successful real estate listing companies in Europe. Servicing primarily German-speaking countries, the site has more than three million visitors each month and serves more than 800 million pages. Headquartered in Berlin, the company currently has approximately 400 employees and serves more than 95,000 realtors – its paying customers.

Since its website is the core of its business, uptime and performance are crucial factors for meeting customer expectations. To meet these demands, ImmobilienScout24 had previously migrated from a 32-bit Windows server environment to a more sophisticated 64-bit server environment based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and added a second fully redundant active-active data center in Hamburg to support its existing datacenter in Berlin. Each location had approximately 100 physical servers running a variety of applications including Oracle, MySQL, Apache, Tomcat, and LAMP-based subsystems as well as PHP and Perl for front-end applications.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
With many servers scheduled for end-of-life in 2008, ImmobilienScout24 planned a major virtualization initiative with the goal of speeding provisioning time and lowering overall operating costs per server instance.

However, early in the year, ImmobilienScout24’s Tier-1 datacenter provider came to the company with dramatic news—the vendor could not provide any more power, at any cost, to ImmobilienScout24’s servers. Energy prices were rising quickly and the provider had been given new limitations on its electricity supply to certain locations.

Considering the company’s growth rate, ImmobilienScout24 knew that it would begin to exceed the new power limitation within a few months and had to act quickly. Evaluating other datacenter providers was considered, but the cost and complexity of migrating datacenters was extraordinary and would likely result in some downtime – an unacceptable option.

In reviewing its planned virtualization project, ImmobilienScout24 found that it could reduce power consumption and allow the company to continue its rapid growth into the future. However, this meant completing an eight-month project in just four months.

SOLUTION
Giving the virtualization project priority, the ImmobilienScout24 team quickly got to work planning the migration of 200 old physical servers onto 90 new physical servers with more than 400 logical server instances.

The first challenge was in selecting a virtualization solution. In its test lab in Berlin, ImmobilienScout24 worked closely with their Operations Service provider, Computacenter to begin a series of tests to monitor and measure the performance of a variety of services on both physical and virtual machines. The company measured that services running on VMware typically showed a 20 percent performance degradation compared to services running on the physical server.

When it tested Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform virtualization capabilities, tests showed only a mere three percent difference between virtual and physical machines – an impressive virtualization performance result.

ImmobilienScout24 also considered pricing. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform includes virtualization integrated in the operating system at no additional cost – a benefit few other vendors are able to deliver. It eliminates the need to add an additional, and often expensive, third-party vendor layer to its solution, while delivering leading performance. Combining performance and cost benefits, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform was the solution of choice for ImmobilienScout24.

The second challenge ImmobilienScout24 faced was designing a system that would maximize redundancy and performance for each service. And, while also ensuring that the failure of one service would not affect the rest of the system. Achieving specific utilization levels was less important to ImmobilienScout24 than cutting energy and ensuring redundancy and uptime for the project.

So, ImmobilienScout24 worked closely with Computacenter to deploy Red Hat Cluster Suite, included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform at no added cost, to create a comprehensive network design that included failover clusters between different physical machines. It also updated its Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers to support both 32- and 64-bit virtual machines. By carefully designing the clusters and physical and virtual machines, the team created a system that could easily accommodate future growth, while maintaining 100 percent uptime.

To manage its systems, ImmobilienScout24 also utilizes Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite, a reliable, easy-to-use systems management solution that provides simple tools to efficiently manage the lifecycle of systems on its network. With RHN Satellite, ImmobilienScout24 was able to streamline its management and reduce costs.

In the conception phase of the project there were sometimes up to ten people contributing to the project, but in the datacenters, the brunt of the project was implemented by a team of four. “Executing this rapidly with a fixed number of people simply would not have been possible with most other vendors,” said Oliver Schindelhauer, project leader. “Administrative tasks including imaging, server provisioning, and mapping are really fast with Red Hat.” The team started the project in February and was finished by the end of May—on schedule and without any downtime.

BENEFITS
The project was considered an all-around success and resulted in significant savings for ImmobilienScout24. Power consumption was reduced by 25 percent – 21 megawatt hours per month – without affecting performance or uptime. Hardware cost per server was reduced by 60 percent, and the project reduced ImmobilienScout24’s licensing costs by 50 percent with the use of open source software. The project also reduced operations costs by 10 percent through simplified system management.

“Without this solution we would not have been able to continue the growth that our executive team planned for the year,” said Dr. Oliver Zeiler, chief technology officer for ImmobilienScout24. “But now, we have a significantly more agile and cost-efficient datacenter and services infrastructure. In fact, with the cost savings we’ve achieved with Red Hat, this project will have paid for itself in three months.”