Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite is Red Hat’s on-premises systems management solution that provides software updates, configuration management, provisioning and monitoring across both physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. It offers customers opportunities to gain enhanced performance, centralized control and higher scalability for their systems, while deployed on a management server located inside the customer’s datacenter and firewall.

In September 2009, Red Hat released RHN Satellite 5.3, the first fully open source version of the product. This latest version offers opportunities for increased flexibility and faster provisioning setups for customers with the incorporation of open source Cobbler technology in its provisioning architecture. The 5.3 release is also designed to allow customers to better scale with server growth, offering the ability to manage large numbers of systems with comparable ease to managing one.

Recently, IDC also published a Red Hat-sponsored paper featuring the systems management benefits that customers have experienced with RHN Satellite. After interviewing 10 RHN Satellite customers in depth – crossing geographies and industry verticals — IDC reported significant return on investment (ROI) and productivity results for customers. Here are some of the highlights from the customer testimonials:

Average of 338% ROI

Average payback period of 4.8 months

A doubled increase in the number of Linux servers managed per system administrator

Average annual benefit of $82,521 per 100 Linux servers

Average of $23,207 in annual user productivity increase

In their own words, customers quoted in the paper showed that RHN Satellite helped them achieve:

Enhanced productivity: “If RHN Satellite Server didn’t exist, I would need another person or more.”

Scalability: “…with Satellite Server, once things are set up and it is in place, managing 200 servers is as easy as managing one.”

Reduced costs: “For an OS install, we used to hire someone outside to do the work. We would buy the hardware, then we pay them to come on site, answer questions. So now, we are completely avoiding that cost.”

Faster server setup and management: “As far as time saving goes, I would say we are easily saving 20 hours per month because we aren’t doing things manually.”

Business growth: “In terms of the impact, I always count what we can sell in an hour. If the system is down, we can’t sell and that’s a revenue impact. In just one hour, we might lose millions of euros, so the impact is huge.”

To read the full IDC paper on RHN Satellite, visit here.

To learn more about RHN Satellite, visit here.

Or, to read more about what customers have to say about RHN Satellite, visit here.

FAST FACTS

Company: Alpine Electronics

Industry: Electronics: Consumer

Geography: United States

Business Challenge: Without a single integrated enterprise resource planning and supply chain management solution, Alpine lacked the consolidated business data required for accurate long-term planning

Software: SAP Business Suite, SAP ERP 6.0, SAP NetWeaver, IBM Cognos 8 Planning, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: Systemx: System x3850

Solution: IBM Global Business Services leveraged its electronics and automotive industry expertise to design, deploy and manage a solution based on SAP Business Suite. Niteo, an IBM Business Partner, also helped to implement IBM Cognos Planning, which captures sales and budget data downloaded from the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse system at the Japanese headquarters location

Benefits: Enhanced process efficiencies have led to much more rapid access to business intelligence. By using SAP ERP, monthly financial closes can be completed up to 30 percent faster than before, and there has been a 40 percent reduction in operational workload for the finance department.

Download the case study from the IBM website [PDF]

Background
Based in Torrance, California, Alpine Electronics USA Inc. develops and markets a wide range of leading-edge integrated mobile media entertainment, and navigation systems for mobile use. The company employs 300 people and has a separate sister company which has strong focus on research and development – continually striving to generate and enhance a new kind of in-vehicle experience, based on the convergence of high performance audio, video, navigation and telematics in the form of integrated mobile multimedia systems.

As well as marketing its in-car mobile media systems to consumers, Alpine also designs and manufactures complete, integrated systems for the automotive sector. To align with the long-term strategies of the automotive manufacturers, Alpine needs to be able to plan sales and production 2-3 years ahead.

“Alpine operates under two separate business elements,” explains Mick Ono, Senior IT Manager at Alpine Electronics USA Inc. “The first is aimed at the after-market, working through retailers and representatives to sell products that can be fitted to existing vehicles. The second works directly with automotive manufacturers to integrate advanced mobile media solutions into new vehicles.”
Predicting future trends

“Working with the automotive manufacturers is a unique challenge: they are already designing vehicles that will not reach the dealerships until 2012. To supply integrated mobile media solutions that will meet the needs of drivers and passengers three or four years in the future, we need to be able to plan sales, quantities and pricing a long way ahead.”

Without a single integrated enterprise resource planning and supply chain management solution, Alpine lacked the consolidated business data required for accurate long-term planning. By establishing a central database as a ‘single source of truth’, and by gaining the ability to collect and analyze data in real time, Alpine could understand its current position and sales history, and analyze market trends from other sources to help forecast its future direction.

Finding a way forward
“We were coming from a situation where our North American manufacturing and sales companies were separate entities, each with its own IT systems,” says Mick Ono. “We decided to consult IBM to find the best way to implement a single centralized solution that could manage our operations and long-term planning processes from end-to-end.”

IBM Global Business Services performed a feasibility study to explore the unique requirements of Alpine’s business, and recommend both a target technology platform and a project management methodology that would ensure the success of the move to a fully integrated solution. Alpine then sent out a request for proposals to a number of leading business and IT consulting companies.

The need for industry-specific expertise
“We received four responses to our request for proposals, and IBM Global Business Services was by far the strongest candidate,” comments Mick Ono. “In addition to technical expertise, we wanted a partner that not only had experience in the electronics sector, but could also provide insight into the demands of the automotive sector, and IBM was one of the few companies that could deliver.

“IBM also has one of the most advanced project management methodologies for ERP implementations, called Ascendant. This gave us confidence that we could achieve this business transformation, fast.”

IBM Global Business Services designed and modeled a wide range of enhanced business processes for Alpine, helping to simplify and automate key workflows in the finance, procurement, sales and inventory management departments. These new processes are managed by applications from the SAP Business Suite, running under Red Hat Enterprise Linux and VMware on IBM x3850 servers.

End-to-end integration of business data
The solution provides an end-to-end process management framework, collecting and integrating data from a wide range of inputs, both digital and physical. Interfaces developed by IBM using the SAP NetWeaver Process Integration component enable Alpine to gather, process and seamlessly exchange data (future usage planning, purchase orders, inventory information and so on) with its local suppliers, its distributors and its largest clients.

This enables total traceability of each financial transaction and physical component throughout the supply chain – an ability that is highly prized by clients in the automotive industry.

With all key business data held in a single central SAP system, Alpine now has a reliable, accurate and accessible historical record of its entire business – which forms a basis for the creation of long-term planning and forecasting activities.

A clear view of business activity
The solution also delivers a wide range of other advantages. Since application support and strategic development is handled by IBM Global Business Services – Application Management Services, Alpine benefits from a highly cost-effective and scalable support model, reducing the need to maintain highly skilled SAP administrators and developers in-house.

IBM maintains the entire SAP environment, ensuring smooth business operation, configuring new business requirements as per standard SAP practice, providing end-user training for new users, and conducting monthly meetings with key customer stakeholders to present the deliverables and project status reports.

IBM has also recently helped the company upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0, bringing its IT infrastructure into line with the parent company in Japan, and potentially paving the way for further ERP integration across the whole group. Keeping up-to-date with the latest SAP application releases also helps Alpine to minimize support costs and implement new functionalities as and when the business requires.

Since IBM provides an onshore/offshore support model by leveraging resources in both the US and India, development of the environment can continue 24×7.

Reaping the benefits
The end-to-end automation of key financial and sales processes has reduced workload for the accounts department by approximately 40 percent, and enabled monthly financial closes to be completed up to 30 percent faster.

“The ability to share the long-term future throughout business owners is very important to us, and it depends to a large extent on doing the simple things right: getting the right information in the first place and handling it reliably in our back office operations,” comments Mick Ono.

“Looking beyond the bells and whistles, you need to have a system that can manage your finances and supply chain effectively. SAP provides the building blocks of that system, and IBM Global Business Services continues to be a highly valued partner in our effort to improve quality and efficiency in all our business processes.”

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.

Brazilian Paint Manufacturer, Tintas Iquine, Migrates from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Increase Performance and Improve Security

FAST FACTS

Customer: Tintas Iquine

Industry: Manufacturing: Paint and Tints

Geography: Brazil

Business Challenge: Increase the stability and performance of business critical ERP applications

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Datasul, Progress Database, Trend Micro Security Solution

Hardware: Intel Xeon processor based Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers

Migration Path: UNIX/RISC based servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon processor based Dell PowerEdge servers

Benefits: Red Hat virtualization enabled increased stability, performances, and increased security on redundancy and backup, and Red Hat Satellite simplified systems management

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Tintas Iquine, a Brazilian paints, coatings, and special resins company, produces more than 1,500 products including; industrial paints, varnish, sealing, resins, pastes, and is known for its rigorous quality control, and its use of new technologies to improve its processes, products and deliver more value to its customers, paint and building material resellers and retailers.

In operation since 1974, Tintas Iquine’s two factories have the capacity to produce 8 million liters of products per month, guaranteeing to the company 6% to 7% of the Brazilian market, operate 24/7 and are fully computerized in order to achieve enhanced production capabilit, security, and in addition, less impactful to the environment. Tintas Iquine achieved the certificate of approval in NBR ISO 9001:2000, which signifies the company´s compliance with the requirements of the standard of Quality Management System in coatings. Iquine also won the certificate of quality of the Brazilian Association fo Manufacturers of Paints.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Tintas Iquine grew significantly in a short amount of time, with sales volume increases of 20-30 percent, the company increased in size from 200 to 500 employees, and needed a operating platform to improve its critical Enterprise Resource Planning applications and increase the IT team’s ability to scale for the company’s growth.

The existing UNIX based server environment at Tintas Iquine supported the ERP system, database, BI, CRM and security tools, consisted of a disparate, aging infrastructure that resulted in a lower application performance level and required resources devoted to systems management and monitoring, making it increasingly difficult and costly.

The new operating platform needed to increase the ERP application’s performance, security, and provide a simplified systems management tool.

SOLUTION
The Tintas Iquine’ IT team was well versed with open source operating platforms, and especially favored Red Hat Enterprise Linux due to the enterprise support, stability, and performance the platform provides, in addition to Red Hat Satellite systems management, that would solve the company’s systems management issues.

With the expertise in-house and the enterprise-ready reputation, Tintas Iquine confidently decided not to conduct a lengthy technical evaluation of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. Due to the breadth of third-party applications certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Tintas Iquine decided to migrate all of its applications from UNIX, as all of the applications would be running under only one operating system, thus increasing the performance and reducing systems management resources.

The migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux involved the virtualization of 12 machines to supports the company’s Progress database, Business Intelligence (BI) applications, CRM and Trend Micro Security Solutions.

BENEFITS
Tintas Iquine’s implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux has allowed the company to scale for growth, increase application performance, reduce costs, and simplify systems management. The satisfaction and gain of performance were immediately realized by the IT staff and throughout the company, as application users began to work more efficiently and more productively.

The virtualization and the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from UNIX, provided Tintas Iquine increased server utilization, and the management process on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux based servers have shown greater agility and ease of use, when compared to the Windows based servers, due to less interruptions in the maintenance process.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the performance in the application processing has increased 30 percent, and the costs have fallen about 50 percent, thus confirming the company’s decision to migrate to Red Hat.

Although Tintas Iquine’s Oracle database is running in a Windows platform, due to the results of the UNIX to Red Hat migration, the company plans to gradually migrate all systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Manufacturing

Geography: India

Challenge: To reduce dependence on UNIX systems, improve cost-efficiency ratio, simplify systems management, and improve scalability for business growth

Migration Path: HP UX/UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on Intel Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge server

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Oracle DB

Hardware: Dell 2950 PowerEdge server, Intel Quad Core Xeon-based E5410 x 2 (Dual CPU) Processors

Benefits: Eliminated vendor lock-in, doubled system performance, slashed costs by one-tenth translating into cost savings of over Rs. 40 lakh (USD $83,333), and gained the ability to independently manage systems

“Today, I have complete peace of mind because Red Hat Enterprise Linux on our Intel Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge server has delivered stability, performance gains, and cost savings while providing the ability to scale to the rapidly growing demands of our organization.”
–Pertish Mankotia, head of IT, Sheela Foam

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
A US 200 million group and an ISO 9001:2000 company, Sheela Foam is the largest manufacturer of flexible Polyurethane Foam (PU) in India. The company ranks among the top five PU foam manufacturing companies in the Asia-Pacific region. In India, the firm has ten manufacturing units, supported through a distribution network of over 70 distributors and 3,000 dealers. The firm also has a presence in Australia, with five manufacturing units located in five major cities. A combination of manufacturing excellence and distribution network has enabled the company to capture over 40 percent of the Indian PU foam market share.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Sheela Foam had previously developed its own custom Enterprise Resource Planning application (ERP), Greatplus, based on Oracle and HP-UX to automate its entire production process, from procurement to production. The custom-built ERP is integrated into Sheela Foam’s distribution network of 70 distributors and 3,000 dealers and the firm also used an innovative SMS-based tracking system that helps the company to accurately track and maintain inventory at the location of its distributors and dealers. With every dispatch made by the company to the dealer, an SMS message is sent to the distributor about the stock dispatched to him.

In this process, every transaction made by the more than 1,500 users worldwide each day was recorded by the ERP system. While the self-constructed ERP system helped Sheela Foam to boost customer confidence, it also meant that the costly system had to be available 24×7.In an effort to improve its cost-value ratio, lower costs, and reduce vendor lock-in, Sheela Foam decided to evaluate a number of platforms, including those based on open source technology.

“As a company, we wanted to maximize the value gained from the support provided, as the support costs were too high and prevented us from scaling effectively,” said Pertish Mankotia, head of IT, Sheela Foam.

Sheela Foam’s HP-UX system, forced it to depend on a proprietary vendor to test and implement improvements, which made the process less effective and expensive to maintain.

Sheela Foam decided to adopt an open source solution after the company’s HP-UX system went down and took more than 16 hours to recover. As a mission-critical system, any system downtime directly impacted the reputation of the company and in turn, sales and profits. The incident provided Sheela Foam the impetus to migrate to an open source solution that could be independently maintained by its own IT team.

SOLUTION
After evaluating a host of options, Sheela Foam consulted Red Hat Enterprise Linux partner Keen & Able Computers. Convinced about the value offered, the firm trusted the market leader, Red Hat, and chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on an Intel Xeon processor-based Dell PowerEdge server. The preloaded Dell 2950 PowerEdge server made the migration and installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux quick and easy. This meant that the system was ready to be tested and could be deployed immediately.

BENEFITS
Red Hat Enterprise Linux on an Intel Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge server has enabled the firm to deploy its ERP on a single server, compared to the two previously required servers, doubling system performance with no downtime. The Red Hat solution has also reduced the amount of time required for processing heavy reports by 25 percent. The reduction in servers and associated maintenance costs has translated to cost savings of over Rs. 40 lakh (USD83,333). The firm now spends only Rs. 4 lakh (USD 8333) per year compared to the more than Rs. 44 lakh (USD 91,667) on its previous UNIX system.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon-based processors has doubled Sheela Foam’s performance levels, significantly lowered costs, and has given it the ability to independently manage its systems. Today, Sheela Foam’s IT team is able to make improvements rapidly with ease.

“Today, I have complete peace of mind because the Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon processor-based Dell PowerEdge server system is known for its stability and is well-designed to scale to the rapidly growing demands of our organization. My only regret is that I did not start this earlier,” said Mankotia.

The trusted Red Hat solution has given the Sheela Foam IT team the ability to focus on more strategic issues that can boost the competitiveness of the company.

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.

Download the PDF

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.”

COMPANY: Verizon Communications Inc.

INNOVATION AWARD CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Telecom; Broadband, Wireless, Wireline

GEOGRAPHY: North America

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Needed a reliable and cost effective solution for its SAP and PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning applications that would scale with its growing computing infrastructure

MIGRATION PATH: UNIX-based SMP platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Red Hat Network Satellite, SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle RAC

HARDWARE: 300 Dell and HP servers

BENEFITS: Reduced costs, improved performance, increased ability to scale and prepared for future growth, increased energy conservation efforts

Download the PDF

BACKGROUND
Verizon Communications Inc., a Dow 30 company, is a global leader in delivering broadband and other wireless and wireline communications services to mass market, business, government and wholesale customers. With more than 235,000 employees, Verizon was selected for the Optimized Systems Innovation Award for its consolidation and standardization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its SAP and PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning applications to reduce costs, increase performance, and allow the ability to scale for growth. The company now runs its servers more efficiently,with minimal need for additional equipment, and Verizon has further bolstered its conservation efforts.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
With a massive global workforce of more than 235,000 employees, Verizon had an increasing need to consolidate and standardize business applications, most notably, its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Due to Verizon’s acquisition business growth and the challenges of implementing disparate systems, and the need to serve its employees, the company needed to migrate its systems to a highly reliable and stable platform that would scale with the growing computing infrastructure while simultaneously reducing costs.

Verizon’s existing UNIX-based IT architecture lacked the ability to cost-effectively scale horizontally with the constant business growth.

SOLUTION
Verizon identified the need to migrate its large proprietary UNIX-based SMP platform to standardize on an open source operating system running on x86 based commodity hardware to achieve the required scalability, reduced costs, and equivalent performance, in regards to all of its business critical PeopleSoft and SAP applications.

After a thorough evaluation period in 2007 of multiple open source vendors, Verizon selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the standard operating system for the mission critical business application migration project.

Verizon decided to deploy the PeopleSoft and SAP project in phases. The first phase began in 2008 and started the financial modules, taking about 6 months to complete before moving to production. The second phase consisted of the HR and Payroll modules and due to the better than expected results, Verizon plans to continue the consolidation with its reporting, warehousing, and credit card processing applications. The PeopleSoft and SAP applications were migrated from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Red Hat Network Satellite and Proxy for Management, Provisioning, & Monitoring running on over 300 Dell and HP Intel/AMD based servers and Oracle RAC.

“With Red Hat Enterprise Linux on standard based x86 commodity hardware, we are able to scale our growth horizontally and meet the needs of our employee base,” said Michael Blake, director, systems and architecture implementation, Verizon, “The fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was certified with all of our third-party applications, such as SAP and PeopleSoft, allowed us to make this decision confidently and proceed quickly, as the costs continued to mount with the previous solution.”

BENEFITS
Migrating the systems off the proprietary UNIX based servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, allowed Verizon to reduce costs, increased its ability to scale and prepared its architecture for future growth, while at the same time providing increased performance.

“If migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux simply allowed us to scale at a fraction of the cost, and provided the same performance, we would have deemed the migration a success,” said Blake, “But, the real impact on the business was the increased performance with the same applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

In addition to the cost savings and performance increase, Verizon also realized a two-thirds reduction in power usage in its data center. “This is a very real and valuable benefit and will have a direct impact on our energy conservation efforts,” said Blake.

Verizon was able to increase capacity, reliability and security, allowing end users to work more efficiently. Blake commented that, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has eliminated performance surges and through the consolidation the company was able to identify bottlenecks in the system, providing a more streamlined environment. End users were minimally disrupted by the change in systems but have since noticed a more improved IT environment. The total cost of ownership has been greatly reduced.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a trusted product with excellent value and allowed us to extract the value of the new HP C-Class hardware,” said Blake, “We also saw Red Hat Network Satellite as a strategic component to our deployment, it enhances patch management, and security, and without Satellite it would be difficult to manage our systems. Satellite simplifies this process and frees up our system administrators for strategic business projects.”

CUSTOMER ADVICE
“For companies in similar situations, the most critical component is to run tests, document, and confirm the expected behavior of your Red Hat certified applications as this will drastically reduce the complexities of the migration project. We knew that with Red Hat, we could worry less about the application certifications, and focus more on proving the business case to secure buy-in from the entire IT organization. By running tests and executing numerous examples for specific teams, we were able to prove to our internal customers, that not only would the solution work, but it will perform better, and at a fraction of the previous costs,” said Blake.

FAST FACTS

Company: CME Group

Industry: Financial Exchange

Geography: Global

Business Challenge: To migrate from a cost-inhibitive proprietary UNIX platform to a Linux alternative in order to reduce costs and increase performance, reliability, scalability, and agility of the systems on which its critical trading platforms handle billions of derivatives trades per year, worth more than a quadrillion in notional value

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), Red Hat Training

Hardware: 4,000 x86 quad-core servers

Migration Path: Sun Solaris on SPARC servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on x86-based servers

Benefits: Achieved reduced latency, expanded flexibility, heightened performance, ease of migration and management, and increased scalability while providing cost savings for the systems responsible for processing CME Group’s millions of daily transactions

“Our technology partnership with Red Hat is key to us staying competitive in the market. We look to Red Hat for technology leadership through updates and support that help us to improve our tuning so that we can give our customers the best possible experience.”
–Joe Panfil, managing director of Enterprise Technology Services at CME Group.

Download case study[PDF]

BACKGROUND
CME Group is the world’s largest and most diverse derivatives exchange. Building on the heritage of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, and New York Mercantile Exchange, CME Group serves the risk management needs of customers around the globe. As an international marketplace, CME Group brings buyers and sellers together on the CME Globex electronic trading platform and on trading floors in Chicago and New York.

CME Group provides the widest range of benchmark futures and options products available on any exchange, covering all major asset classes, including interest rates, equities, FX, commodities, and alternative investments such as weather and real estate. CME Group’s vision is one of ongoing global growth, innovative product development, continually enhanced technology, and the highest level of service available on any exchange.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
CME Group processes millions of transactions per day. In 2008, CME Group’s volume totaled 3.3 billion contracts, worth $1.2 quadrillion in notional value. In order to meet the heavy demands placed on its IT systems, CME Group has rigorous requirements that must be met across the performance, scalability, reliability, ease of use, and costs of its IT infrastructure.

CME Group’s IT architecture must also be agile to scale with rapid system changes in demand and volume. It must reduce latency wherever possible to ensure millisecond response times for its customers, and needs the reliability, scalability, and performance of a mission-critical infrastructure.

Since 1997, CME Group has witnessed a migration of trading volume from the trading floors to its Globex electronic trading platform. Today, 80 percent of CME Group’s volume is handled by its electronic trading platform, with 20 percent of volume still handled on the trading floor.

CME Group previously relied on a proprietary UNIX operating platform, but began looking for affordable, high-performance alternatives in 2002. “Our systems were relying on a proprietary UNIX platform,” said Joe Panfil, managing director of Enterprise Technology Services at CME Group. “As the responsibilities of the UNIX servers grew and the number of applications they ran continued to expand, the cost of running those applications grew too.”

CME Group began investigating alternative platforms and placed an emphasis on examining open source Linux options. After rigorous internal testing, CME Group’s IT team decided that a move to Linux would provide cost, performance, and reliability benefits over its previous Solaris platform. To prepare for the migration, the team created an eight-step plan for moving to Linux.

SOLUTIONS
A key factor in CME Group’s plan to move to Linux was to identify a technology vendor that could provide optimized support for its Linux operating systems. “Our systems are too critical to not have someone to turn to in the event that an issue arises,” said Panfil. “We looked at the players, and Red Hat had the best support infrastructure and the most solid product.”

“We saw the performance advantages of Linux and were looking for ways to reduce costs and increase performance for our customers,” said Vinod Kutty, associate director, Distributed Computing at CME Group. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux fit the bill, and we started to gradually test and deploy it internally. Our organization was an early adopter of open source technologies, and we first deployed Linux in 2003.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux became the primary operating platform for CME Group’s Globex electronic trading platform in 2004. The exchange began by deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, and has migrated to all of the latest versions of the leading operating platform through today’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. During the first year in production in 2004, Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivered a twofold increase in performance and reduced costs for CME Group by 50 percent. Today, 99 percent of its distributed platform runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based servers support both CME Group’s Globex electronic trading platform as well as devices on its trading floors. “We still have a huge interest in the trading floor, but the electronic trading platform is very attractive to those who desire the speed it delivers,” said Panfil. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports both the electronic trading platform and the floor through the server floor displays and hand-held trading devices.”

CME Group’s IT architecture is designed so that every application runs on a minimum of two servers and a disaster-recovery server. “We try to design applications so that failover is seamless and customers don’t see interruptions,” said Panfil.

The move to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on commodity x86 hardware goes hand-in-hand with CME Group’s horizontal scalability model. “Red Hat helped us achieve the level of horizontal scalability that we needed,” said Kutty. “Our ability to add incremental capacity to the thousands of servers we maintain daily with the reliability to deal with the great demands of day-to-day trading is only capable because of Linux and our work with Red Hat.”

Given the history and partnering with Red Hat, CME is considering extending that partnership to JBoss Enterprise Middleware technology. “We’ve worked with JBoss architects on solutions in the past and are now determining if JBoss can help us drive the open source software community in the same manner Red Hat has driven the operating system,” said Joel Tosi, lead applications architect for Front-End Systems at CME Group.

Relying on one vendor for support for both its operating system and middleware layers has proved valuable to CME Group. “The coordination between Red Hat and CME Group has been great,” said Tosi. “We knew we wanted to grow the partnership with Red Hat that we had already established and grown for more than six years. With Red Hat, we also knew we’d get the high visibility we wanted for both our operating system and middleware projects.”

BENEFITS
Performance is a key metric by which CME Group is judged by its customers. Many of CME Group’s customers’ highest priorities are reduced latency and speed. “We need a good balance of performance and reliability,” said Kutty. “We need to be able to react very quickly to changes in business. We don’t want fluctuations in performance and cannot have any downtime.”

“One thing we found was that Linux was faster, and speed in this industry is really important,” said Panfil. “We want customers to get as fast a response time as possible, and with Red Hat Enterprise Linux we gained speed and reduced costs.”

The reduced costs associated with Linux were an attractive factor to CME Group’s selection of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “Cost savings was something we were targeting, but we didn’t know how dramatic the cost savings would be,” said Kutty. “We saved during the initial switch from the support perspective, but over time, a combination of Linux and commodity hardware has continued to deliver reduced costs.”

The IT team expects to gain continued cost savings from elimination of licensing with both its Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform solutions and through resource reallocation. “We see cost savings not only from both the operating system and middleware infrastructures, but from the productivity of staff too,” said Tosi. “We see productivity gains when our staff has the ability to see into the code and also through the ease of management of the systems.”

CME Group also reduced costs by gaining flexibility with its systems. CME Group strategically executes a multi-vendor strategy in order to avoid vendor lock-in. With Red Hat, it achieved a platform with great flexibility through a broad ecosystem of certified hardware and software vendors.

CME Group was quickly able to transition its administrators’ UNIX expertise to its new systems. The team leveraged hands-on Red Hat Training courses to ease the shift of both skills and systems, which resulted in a seamless migration. CME Group also benefited from the skills of its dedicated Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), who offers additional, ongoing Red Hat expertise to the exchange’s IT team. Its TAM is the first line of support and provides one point of contact through which CME Group can collaborate with Red Hat on new technologies and support needs.

“The practical, hands-on nature of Red Hat Training courses provided real value to the transition of our team’s skills to Linux,” said Kutty. “All of our system administrators are Red Hat Certified Engineers (RHCE).”

CME Group today works closely with Red Hat’s performance teams to demonstrate workloads and tune systems for the great performance and reliability demands it mandates for its mission-critical systems. It builds synthetic workloads that replicate the demands of its systems in order to collaborate with Red Hat for future developments for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other products. Together, Red Hat and CME Group form a technology partnership that benefits the entire open source community as well as the vast community of Red Hat customers.

“Our technology partnership with Red Hat is key to us staying competitive in the market,” said Panfil. “We look to Red Hat for technology leadership through updates and support that help us to improve our tuning so that we can give our customers the best possible experience. To be competitive in this industry, we have to use the best possible applications, operating systems, and servers. For our mission-critical systems, we leverage Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

FAST FACTS:

Company: ANSYS Japn K.K.

Industry: Software: CAE

Business Challenge:Provide support for complex analytical simulations: address customer requirements for more advanced CAE technologies, investigate emerging processor technologies, increase productivity

Solution: Deployed the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and selected AMD Opteron™ processors, which are scalable up to 8-processors/32-cores and widely employed in the CAE

Hardware: HP ProLiant DL785 G5, 8-processor, 32-core, Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processors, 256GB DRR2 memory

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, ANSYS, Fluent and other CAE software solutions from ANSYS, Inc.

Benefits: The server runs continuously and stably under high loads. Found a highly manageable way of leveraging the power of the new server, like a cluster in a single box. Achieved a significant reduction in power consumption, making it possible to add additional servers. Provides customers with simulation results more rapidly, addresses customer challenges more flexibly, contributes to higher IT ROI

Overview: US-based ANSYS Inc. has taken a global leadership role in the field of CAE software, an integral and indispensable part of many manufacturing processes. ANSYS Japan K.K., the Japanese arm of ANSYS Inc., has deployed the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux to keep pace with customer demand for complex engineering simulations. The company appreciates the benefits of the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including its stability under high loads and significantly reduced power consumption.

Download the Full Case Study at HP.com

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: Odyssey Logistics & Technology Corporation (OL&T)

Industry: Transportation: Managed logistics services for the chemicals and process industries

Geography: Headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut with international offices in North America and Europe

Business Challenge: Needed to cost-effectively scale its infrastructure to meet exponential growth in the business

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Oracle Database, Oracle ProC

Hardware: 33 multi-core Intel® Xeon® based IBM xSeries servers

Migration Path: HP-UX and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and multicore Intel Xeon processor based servers

Benefits: Ability to add transaction processing and storage capacity quickly and cost-effectively as business continues to expand. Ensures uptime and reliability to customers relying on Odyssey Logistics & Technology to run mission-critical supply chain operations

“Migrating to Linux was synonymous with migrating to Red Hat. Because of its rigorous quality control, Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers is truly a rock-solid platform. Its reliability continues to impress us daily,” said Massey. “And we increasingly think of Red Hat as a partner, not a vendor. We absolutely trust Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel with our most mission-critical systems.”
– Brad Massey, director, IT Support Services, Odyssey Logistics & Technology

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Odyssey Logistics & Technology provides global logistics management services to the chemical industry and other process manufacturers. OL&T delivers a comprehensive portfolio of logistics services to the chemicals and process industries so that clients’ products are delivered safely, reliably and economically, with the advantage of shipment visibility and actionable data across all modes.  

OL&T presents a unique scope of industry knowledge, experience and technology, applied to client supply chain operations in two distinct outsourced logistics contexts: Managed Logistics Services and Third Party Services. The OL&T team of chemical engineers and logisticians brings unparalleled expertise—they are chemical and process industry insiders, intimately familiar with the supply chain complexities and hazardous materials requirements. Its technology backbone, the Odyssey Global Logistics PlatformSM features a net-native transportation management infrastructure that supports highly integrated, flexible and data-rich service offerings.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 2005, OL&T ran its business primarily on HP-UX and Windows systems. But that infrastructure simply couldn’t support a business growing as fast as OL&T’s. First, there were cost issues. Adding proprietary RISC/UNIX hardware to handle its rapidly rising transaction volumes was prohibitively expensive. “So we began looking at ways we could handle growth by using standard based servers rather than simply buying more UNIX boxes,” said Brad Massey, director, IT Support Services for OL&T.

Then there was reliability. As OL&T’s customer list grew to include some of the largest and most recognizable names in the chemical industry, it simply couldn’t afford any downtime. “UNIX and Windows are not the friendliest environments to operate,” said Massey. “With the growth we were experiencing, we had a lot of concerns about the stability and scalability of our systems. We needed to make sure we could handle all of the new customers we were implementing.” According to Massey, the impact of downtime would be serious to OL&T’s customers. “We’re integrated right into our customers’ supply chain operations, and have to respond in real time to their needs 24/7,” he said. “We’re mission-critical to them, which means that having a stable infrastructure is mission-critical to us,” he said.

Over the past three years, OL&T has seen an 83% compounded growth rate in transactions through the system. Given the firm’s rapid rate of growth, the ability to scale was critical. OL&T decided it needed to implement a virtualized environment so that it would be able to scale on-demand.

SOLUTION
To address all these challenges, OL&T decided to do a complete infrastructure “refresh” that involved migrating all of its HP-UX and most of its Windows systems over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers. Today, OL&T deploys Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on IBM xSeries servers and virtualized on IBM 3850 M2 servers. It also implemented Red Hat Satellite to manage provisioning and administration of its Red Hat systems. “Through our use of Red Hat Satellite, Odyssey has realized: centralized configuration management and compliance, faster patch deployment and more streamlined server deployment,” said Massey.

On the decision to move to Red Hat over other Linux distributions, Massey said there was hardly any discussion at all. “Red Hat is the market leader, period,” he said. “Migrating to Linux was synonymous with migrating to Red Hat.”

Though the majority of the company’s mission-critical systems have been migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the deployment is “ongoing,” Massey said. “We started with our Oracle database, and our HP-UX batch processing, and were so pleased with the results that we have continued to progress toward making as much of our infrastructure as possible run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

BENEFITS
The migration went extraordinary smoothly, and was accomplished “virtually painlessly,” said Massey. And, the cost savings were immediate. There were direct savings, as OL&T was able to keep up with its exponential growth by replacing its proprietary RISC/UNIX boxes with virtualized x86 based systems. And because it had deployed Red Hat Satellite, these virtual machines could be provisioned in a matter of just minutes rather than the hours it previously took to get a new server up and running.

Then there were indirect savings due to increased IT worker productivity. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux is just so much easier to manage than either UNIX or Windows,” said Eric Brown, database administrator. As a result, OL&T can do more with fewer people. “Even with our tremendous growth, we’ve been able to continue to manage our IT operations with a reasonable staffing level,” said Massey. “And given the kickstart and configuration management capabilities of Red Hat Satellite, our workers can add a lot more value to our organization

About the quality of the support OL&T receives from Red Hat, Massey said it’s a moot point. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux just works,” he said. “That’s the beauty of it.” He said he can count on one hand the number of support calls he’s had to make – but stressed that those support calls were promptly and professionally dealt with. “The attention and care that Red Hat provides to its customers is truly enterprise-class,” he said.

As far as the workloads that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is capable of supporting, Massey said that it’s been able to handle everything OL&T has thrown at it. “We’ve migrated our Oracle databases over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from Windows and our mission critical batch services for planning and rating from HP-UX over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” he said. “In fact, we’ve completely eliminated UNIX from our environment.” OL&T is currently also in process of moving its Java workloads from Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Because of its rigorous quality control, Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based servers is truly a rock-solid platform. Its reliability continues to impress us daily,” said Massey. “And we increasingly think of Red Hat as a partner, not a vendor. We absolutely trust Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel with our most mission-critical systems.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Manufacturing

Geography: Republic of Korea

Challenge: Migrate to a flexible platform to achieve cost savings for server consolidation in the data center project

Migration: UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Database

Hardware: IBM xSeries, HP BladeSystem

Benefits: Reduce server operating costs; achieve reliable and flexible system operation

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Headquartered in South Korea, POSCO (formerly known as the Pohang Iron and Steel Co.) is one of the world’s largest suppliers of iron and steel products. The company produces more than 30 million tons of steel a year, employs more than 20,000 workers and includes subsidiaries: POSCO Engineering & Construction (which builds steel plants, steel-related infrastructure, and energy facilities) and POSDATA (systems integration).

POSCO operates iron and steel making operations in South Korea and India that are renowned for their high efficiencies throughout a physically huge and complex operational structure., so choosing a fool-proof backup and recovery system is critical to the company’s business health.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
POSCO relies heavily on an extensive array of servers to deploy numerous applications for day-to-day operations handling a massive volume of data transactions daily, making the operating platform for the servers critical to the company’s business health.

POSCO, through its systems integrator subsidiary, POSDATA, embarked on a project to replace its aging, disparate systems with an integrated platform as the company was experiencing problems with system performance, and cost control. The company needed to identify an operating system for the system wide server refresh project that would take place over three stages from 2004 to 2009.

SOLUTION
POSCO needed to replace its dated and costly UNIX servers with IBM and HP x86 commodity servers in order to consolidate its systems into one large-sized data center. POSCO began benchmark testing and the evaluation of operating system vendors. Paramount to POSCO’s decision was the solution’s ability to provide a flexible environment while matching, if not improving, the reliability and performance of its existing UNIX platform. POSCO also aimed to reduce operating costs. Already familiar with Linux, POSCO selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its server consolidation project because of Red Hat’s reliability, increased performance, security, and the resulting reduction in operating costs.

POSCO began gradually migrating its operating environment for select business systems from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux dating back to 2004 and today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux currently runs on more than 50 percent of POSCO’s servers. Due to the increased performance and cost savings, POSCO plans to continue its UNIX-to-Red Hat Enterprise Linux migration as the solution enabled the company to cut reporting time, improve data quality, strengthen accounting and financial planning, enhance asset management, and achieve integration within systems.

The organization has adopted six Sigma, in-house bulletin and data warehousing for new business systems and has performed migration of several systems, including ERP, EP/mail, KM, EDMS, and EAI from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

BENEFITS
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has provided POSCO’s systems the reliability and performance expected from the operating platform systems, while providing unmatched reductions in operating costs when compared to UNIX and proprietary solutions.

“By deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux in an industry where IT trends are changing rapidly and user demands are becoming more diverse, we can save development costs and time. In particular, we can drastically reduce maintenance costs because we are purchasing subscriptions rather than proprietary licenses. In addition, the high interoperability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and industry-standard hardware and certified applications enables reliable systems operation,” said Oh Jong Wan, Manager of Information Planning Department Information Service Group for POSCO

In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is equipped with a wide range of certifications through a broad ecosystem of hardware and software partners that allow POSCO to be flexible with their systems and selected vendors.

Because the entire deployment is open source it reduced development costs, eliminated license fees and significantly increased work productivity leading to shorter development time.

FAST FACTS

Company: Red Hat

Industry: Open source software

Geography: US – Raleigh, NC

Opportunity: Implement and build a reliable, high-performance platform using SOA to meet growing business and performance demands

Migration Path: Tomcat 5 to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle BPEL and, Mule ESB to JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: Established a reliable platform with zero unplanned downtime, reduced hardware costs by more than 50 percent, increased performance by more than 25 percent, and increased resource efficiency for the IT organization

“The JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio is the cornerstone in our middleware infrastructure and our IT architecture vision. We have laid the groundwork to establish a world class technology stack, largely based on the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.”
–Lee Congdon, Chief Information Officer, Red Hat.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, offering choice to customers building open source IT infrastructures. Its unique business model provides open source subscriptions for its high-quality, affordable technology. Its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and service-oriented architecture solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware, deliver industry-leading value. The company is based in Raleigh, NC and has more than 60 offices around the world. Red Hat’s internal IT organization serves more than 2500 global employees with data centers in Phoenix, AZ.

OPPORTUNITY
In 2007, Red Hat was growing exponentially in employee size, and faced increasing demands on the internal IT systems, thus challenging the existing infrastructure. Red Hat’s internal IT organization was faced with increased system integration and support issues, that were consuming considerable time and taking focus away from strategic issues. The IT organization needed an enterprise grade solution that was stable, simple and scalable.

The IT organization was handling internal maintenance and devoting critical resources to solving commodity solutions which reduced cycles available for solving critical business problems. The IT organization devoted resources to developing and building custom solutions for Tomcat including: security solutions to support single-sign-on, a clustering implementation to handle high scalability, a transaction and persistence solution to support functionality similar to the Java Transaction Architecture (JTA) and Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) transaction support, deployment solutions to segment large application deployments into multiple contexts, and scheduling service implementations utilizing Quartz that were non-cluster aware and inefficient.

“We tightly coupled our in-house custom solutions to our internal processes in order to reduce the development effort. As a result there was no ability to upstream our contributions and we took on the burden of maintaining them,” said Mathew Hicks, IT manager, Red Hat. “The cost of this effort eventually became high enough to minimize our consumption of community updates and our systems were in danger of becoming dated.”

“Our team spent considerable time and resources creating valuable custom solutions to ensure we met the growing demands of our users. But as we grew we encountered server sprawl issues that constrained our resources. First, our custom solutions didn’t scale for high availability scenarios and the fragility of the infrastructure increased along with the number of solutions,” said Hicks, “We needed a solution that would reduce the burden of custom solution maintenance, eliminate single points-of-failure, and optimize the IT infrastructure for scalability,” said Hicks.

SOLUTION
Red Hat obviously had experience with JBoss Enterprise Middleware products, but the decision to deploy on the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and SOA Platform for internal systems was a strict business decision that would benefit the technical advances of Red Hat IT and better serve the entire company. Red Hat IT operates with its own performance requirements and those requirements were the drivers for choosing to implement JBoss products internally.

Red Hat IT decided to implement a modular based, service-oriented architecture (SOA) to replace its organization’s traditional IT infrastructure. The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform includes a next-generation ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) for service mediation, jBPM Framework and the JBoss Rule engine for business process automation infrastructure, which enables superior business execution, responsiveness, and flexibility in a cost-effective, open platform. One of the features of an SOA is that it allows companies to build composite services in which business processes can be extended over a number of different applications. The first phase of the migration involved deploying JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

Red Hat needed a supportable, enterprise-caliber solution that leveraged commodity solutions, maintained by the community.

Red Hat IT required:

• A framework to allow them to identify solutions
• Ability to work more closely with the business to understand future needs
• Better way for teams within IT to collaborate
• Means to scale their efforts and to expand capabilities
• Desire to collaborate with the community inside/outside of Red Hat
• Use products that allow for common system administration capabilities such as configuration management and RPM based packaging

Red Hat IT decided to migrate its customer facing Java application infrastructure, including the including 30 web applications and services, from Tomcat 5 to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

By deploying the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat was able to replace a complex clustering solution and utilize the JBoss clustering capabilities to dynamically size the application server cluster to any processing load the organization could encounter. Red Hat IT also replaced their custom single sign-on functionality with a JBossSX-based, cluster aware single sign-on solution.

“By removing the need for a dedicated clustering database, we realized a 4:1 reduction in hardware and the use of JGroups-based clustering yielded increased performance per transaction and higher availability,” said Chris Alfonso, enterprise architect, Red Hat. “We are taking full advantage of the high-availability solutions offered by JBoss including in-memory caching, clustering, HA-JNDI, and automatic discovery.”

Red Hat’s growth as a company and the constant addition of end-users, made dynamic scaling capacity a priority for the IT organization. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform enabled an increase in cluster capacity through the ability to auto-discover additional nodes, and the means to decrease the overall footprint when not in use.

“This gave us the flexibility to not invest in a ‘high watermark’ infrastructure,” said Hicks. “We were able to segment the cluster to manage workloads, with minimal impact to the infrastructure. This resulted in a more efficient use of our resources and ability to scale for future demands.”

Part of the overall initiative was to replace an existing Oracle BPEL and Mule ESB implementation with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. It provides a means to integrate vendor systems while transparently mediating their inherent incompatibilities and orchestrating the interactions.

The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform implementation operates in a clustered environment, interacting with messaging queues backed by both Oracle and MySQL. The MySQL queues utilized database replication to provide database fail-over and high availability across the cluster.

“From a performance perspective, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform has proven to handle our heaviest workloads very well. During the peak of our workload, we receive about 7,500 messages an hour, yet the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform can handle approximately 7000 messages in 15 minutes, on a single node cluster,” said Rico Hendriks, manager of Middleware and Services, Red Hat. “This tells us that we have the ability to scale the business from a rate of more than $650M annually to a rate of more than $2.5B annually in transaction flow with our existing capital investment.”

As early adopters of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, Red Hat IT leveraged Red Hat Consulting for the implementation to assist with an aggressive scope and time line to ensure stability, and a seamless, uninterrupted, successful integration.

“The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provided the features that enabled us to ‘right-size’ our middleware infrastructure,” said Hendriks. “Mainly, with automatic discovery of cluster members and a cluster aware Enterprise Service Bus, we can now monitor utilization of the application server and appropriately resize to any given processing needs.”

BENEFITS
With JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat IT now focuses on helping users increase productivity and solve strategic business issues. There is also a focus on making the organization as a whole more competitive, rather than handling technical issues. Red Hat was able to reduce hardware costs, increase performance, maximize resources and rely on quality support.

“Red Hat IT made a conscious decision to utilize JBoss Enterprise Middleware, as opposed to JBoss.org Community projects, because it did not want to be in the software integration and support business, but rather focus on business goals. The availability of quality support, with no more than 24-hours before issues were closed, was a major benefit for the company,” said Lee Congdon, chief information officer, Red Hat.

Initial measurements of the performance under JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform were significantly improved compared to our existing messaging solution. “In benchmark testing, the results showed a substantial improvement in the response times for almost all transactions represented in the test,” said Alfonso. “The maximum time was reduced from 6.2 seconds to 392ms, and the average was reduced from 742ms to 304ms. Resulting in JBoss performance exceeding our existing messaging solution by 25 percent.”

Furthermore, “Through implementing JBoss solutions, we were able to reduce the hardware footprint by more than 50 percent, which significantly reduced long term costs on hardware, power and cooling. Additional IT benefits were speed and cost of implementation, including simplicity, openness and cost effectiveness,” added Alfonso.

“We depend on JBoss.org Community projects to drive the innovation and JBoss Enterprise Middleware to deliver the stability and support that we need. With all the moving pieces that go into a solution like JBoss, it’s very valuable to have a working combination of components so that we can focus on building solutions for our customers,” said Congdon.

Whenever new products or refreshed versions of product come out from the engineering groups, Red Hat IT is one of the first groups to evaluate integrating them into the production environment. “As Red Hat continues its investment in management tools such as JBoss Operations Network and oVirt, we envision introducing those solutions, to streamline our processes and better serve our workforce,” said Hicks.

“The JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio is a cornerstone in our middleware infrastructure and our IT architecture vision,” said Congdon. “We have laid the groundwork to establish a world class technology stack, largely based on JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.”

FAST FACTS

Customer: Healthplan Services (HPS)

Geography: North America

Industry: Healthcare

Migration Path: Sun Solaris 9 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform; Sun SPARC servers to virtualized Linux instances on HP ProLiant DL380 servers

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with built-in Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS), Red Hat Network, Apache webserver, MySQL databases, IBM DB2

Hardware: HP ProLiant DL380 servers

Benefits: Increased performance, usability and convenience; enhanced support, and reduced cost with a Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux migration on HP ProLiant servers

“The speed is going to increase: we’ll see people working faster, and we’ll be able to process more claims, all by switching an operating system. I can’t believe it was that cut and dry.”
– Adam Atkinson, UNIX administrator at Healthplan Services

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Healthplan Services (HPS) is the nation’s largest independent provider of service and technology solutions to the insurance and managed care industries. HPS offers customized administration and distribution services to insurers in the individual, small group, and voluntary markets supporting health insurance and ancillary product lines (i.e., dental, life, disability, accident, cancer, etc.).

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
HPS faced three major business challenges with its aging Sun Solaris on SPARC hardware with RISC architecture. First, the Sun UNIX-based solution delivered limited application performance and support. In one year, HPS dealt with four service degrading incidents. Second, the escalating cost of the SPARC systems were becoming a drag on HPS’ limited IT budget. Third, employees were experiencing slow response times, and the developers complained about usability issues with the Solaris operating system.

HPS needed an operating system that could interoperate with Microsoft Windows Active Directory, and desired a reliable platform that optimized performance and was easy to upgrade. Because its customer service applications were experiencing page loading delays, HPS needed to increase computing performance to meet the needs of its customers and employees.

SOLUTION
Adam Atkinson, HPS’ UNIX administrator, manages some 200 web, database, and FTP servers, 30 of which were pure UNIX systems utilizing Solaris 9 on Sun SPARC servers. After recognizing the organization’s UNIX systems were becoming outdated and obsolete, Atkinson decided to conduct research to find a high-performing alternative solution.

Atkinson investigated three primary options for the HPS operating system migration: Novell SUSE, Solaris 10, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform. Quickly eliminating Novell SUSE because it was not a standard in his organization, the decision came to Solaris 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform. Atkinson decided to run benchmarks to compare the operating platforms. His testing revealed that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was superior for each benchmark. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform ran pages at more than three times the speed (452 pages per second) of Solaris (135 pages per second) in one test. “That’s a massive difference,” said Atkinson.

In addition to performance testing, cost was also a primary consideration in identifying a solution. When comparing Solaris 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the optimal platform was obvious. “Upgrading Solaris is hard to do. With a migration to Solaris 10, due to high costs associated with SPARC servers, we would have needed to migrate our hardware platform from SPARC to Intel, which would have required me to recompile nearly all of my modules and applications. If we were going to make a big technology move like what Solaris 10 would have required, we decided to look at all of our opportunities, and that meant hosting Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant servers became a truly viable option for us,” said Atkinson.

Atkinson, who was familiar with Red Hat’s usability benefits, also evaluated support comparisons between Red Hat and Sun. “Solaris support is fine as long as you’re using new equipment and Sun’s latest operating system version, but you will pay an extreme premium as soon as your version begins to age. We did not use Sun’s Solaris support because it was too expensive. Instead, we had third-party support.” HPS recognized a cost savings in Red Hat’s subscription model and was especially impressed with Red Hat’s patch management and package management capabilities available through the reliable Red Hat Network systems management platform.

Another valuable advantage provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform is the solution’s integrated Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS) technologies for no added price. Red Hat Global File System is comparable in speed and performance to Veritas. But, Veritas comes with an added cost and additional vendor relationship, while with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, HPS would receive its file system clustering solution integrated with the operating system free of charge.

“Red Hat’s integrated file system clustering technology was important to us. I was paying Veritas for support every year, whereas with GFS through Red Hat, it’s free with my subscription and the support is there too,” said Atkinson.

The cost and time savings delivered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, coupled with the solution’s enhanced performance and support, as well as the increased ease of use for customers and employees, convinced Atkinson, his team, and his company to select Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform to replace its unreliable Solaris systems.

HPS is currently in the process of migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant DL380 servers with virtualization capabilities, superior uptime and effortless management. The company expects Red Hat to be fully in production in August 2009. “We’re moving our systems technology-to-technology instead of server-to-server in more of a piecemeal fashion. It’s more consumable to us that way,” said Atkinson.

BENEFITS
HPS is most excited about the impending performance benefits that will result from its migration away from Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “The speed is going to increase: we’ll see people working faster, and we’ll be able to process more claims, all by switching an operating system. I can’t believe it was that cut and dry,” said Atkinson. The company also recognized great benefits in the general manageability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “To stage a Solaris server, it takes a lot of time to do even simple tasks,” said Atkinson. “Red Hat frees up my time. Tasks that took 30 minutes with Solaris take five minutes with Red Hat. Installing one package across all systems with Red Hat might take an hour, as opposed to a full day with Solaris.”

The collaboration of the vast open source community is expected to provide an additional benefit to HPS with the Red Hat migration. With the open source community, innovation happens more quickly and provides greater technology enhancements than the alternative proprietary model. “If I run a search for a quick ‘Solaris’ fix, I might get 10 results as opposed to the thousands I receive when I search ‘Red Hat,’” said Atkinson. Red Hat takes the innovation that happens in the community and certifies and tests the technology so that HPS knows it will work seamlessly in its IT infrastructure. With the backing of Red Hat support and the consistent management capabilities provided by Red Hat Network, Atkinson and his coworkers save time, which allows the reallocation of staff resources to more business-critical tasks.

HPS is expecting a three-year return on investment (ROI) once its full Red Hat Enterprise Linux migration is complete. “After three years, we’ll be generating money,” said Atkinson. “I feel that we will immediately see an increase of revenue with the speed difference. The return on investment being 3 years is purely technology, we will see it much sooner at the business level.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Transportation

Geography: Singapore

Business Challenge: Provide an alternative channel for taxi booking to alleviate phone call booking overload during peak periods

Solution: Short Message Service (SMS) booking system developed on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Seam

Benefits: Allows customers to book a taxi anytime, anywhere using SMS in just 30 seconds, which means less waiting time for customers and more booking jobs for cab drivers

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
ComfortDelGro is the world’s second largest public-listed passenger land transport company with a fleet of 45,000 vehicles. The Group has a global workforce, shareholder base and outlook. Headquartered in Singapore, it has operations in China, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Vietnam, and Malaysia.

ComfortDelGro was formed in 2003 through the merger of two land transport giants – Comfort Group and DelGro Corporation. Both had started out in the 1970s and had, by the time of the merger, grown to become successful listed land transport companies.

Comfort and CityCab, the group’s two taxi companies, are the largest in Singapore with a combined fleet of about 15,000 taxis.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Catering to more than 20 million taxi bookings annually, ComfortDelGro’s Customer Contact Centre is running at full capacity, with the situation becoming more pronounced during peak hours and on rainy days.

In 2007, the Company started to explore more ways to automate the booking process so as to handle the increasing volume of calls and reduce the time it takes for calls to be handled. Part of the booking process had already been automated with the broadcasting of call bookings to taxis using General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) technology via the in-vehicle Mobile Data Terminals.

As mobile phones are widely used in Singapore, ComfortDelGro decided to implement the Short Message Service (SMS) taxi booking service.

SOLUTION
A closed tender was called with three vendors pitching for the project. “Our criteria were the vendor’s experience in the SMS platform, its track record and support level. The platform must be able to integrate seamlessly with our existing Java-based solutions,” said Ms Wong Oi Mei, Vice President, Information Technology of ComfortDelGro’s Taxi Business.

After carefully considering the options available, the Company decided to pick the JBoss Seam-based solution proposed by Maven Lab, a Red Hat Business Partner under the Infocomm Development Authority’s (IDA) Infocomm Local Industry Upgrading Programme (iLIUP).

“Maven Lab’s proposal matched our requirements. The Red Hat solution also offered lower cost of implementation,” said Oi Mei.

Maven Lab took three months to develop the system, which runs on Windows on HP Intel-based servers. JBoss Seam was used as the application server. A pilot run involving staff and selected customers started in January 2008 and following feedback gathered, the improved and more user-friendly SMS taxi booking service – the first of its kind in Singapore that enables commuters to book a taxi via SMS any time from any location without having to register – was launched.

BENEFITS
The service has proven to be a hit with many customers switching to SMS taxi booking since waiting time is now a mere 30 seconds. It has, in particular, been a boon to another group of customers – the speech- and hearing-impaired passengers. They now can book a taxi by themselves via SMS without having to rely on others for assistance.

“All that our customers, including the speech- and hearing-impaired passengers, have to do is to send a SMS and wait for a SMS response. This process bypasses the contact centre agents and IVR, saving time on waiting for the call to be answered and waiting on the line for confirmation. Our customers will also not have to experience getting an engaged tone during busy periods,” said Oi Mei.

Around 2% of all taxi bookings are now made via SMS. ComfortDelGro aims to increase this figure to 5% of all bookings by the end of 2009.

“ComfortGelGro is using the SMS taxi booking service as another channel to help improve customer experience. Using the Red Hat’s JBoss Seam-based solution has ensured that the company has a stable, reliable and cost-effective system to support this service,” said Hiew Wee Soon, Director of Maven Lab.

Oi Mei is pleased with the success of using open source solutions. “We are impressed with JBoss for its reliability and flexibility, and the support and service level from Red Hat,” she said.

Building on this good experience, ComfortDelGro will be using JBoss Seam and Hibernate for its customer and driver portals, both of which are expected to be launched later in 2009.

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

Company: MedQuist Inc.

Industry: Clinical Documentation Workflow Solutions

Geography: Mount Laurel, New Jersey

Business Challenge: Enabling a rapidly growing, high-volume, 24×7 business, through the creation of an agile and highly productive development environment for building and running mission-critical applications.

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: x86 servers

Migration Path: From many database centric Windows platform components towards a SOA enterprise architecture providing service orchestration, platform independence and loose coupling of coarse-grained application modules. The latter allows for an evolutionary approach to re-platforming of a very large enterprise system without a large up-front cost and significant business risk.

Benefits: A highly productive, flexible and robust application development environment that enables MedQuist to proficiently produce innovative functionality for customer-facing solutions and to quickly take advantage of newly acquired applications by efficiently integrating them into its DocQment Enterprise Platform.

“Our applications are mission critical and absolutely need to be available 24×7. Red Hat’s JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Linux products just work, enabling us to focus on building industry-leading software, which in turn helps our customers reduce their costs and improve patient care.”
– Dan Garnett, Vice President of Product Development, MedQuist.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
MedQuist Inc. is a leading provider of medical transcription software and related services. By delivering solutions that automate document creation and workflow to hospitals, doctors, and other healthcare providers, MedQuist helps its customers efficiently manage large volumes of complex clinical information.

The company has two separate but connected sources of revenues. First, it offers comprehensive software solutions that include digital voice capture, speech recognition, electronic signature, medical coding systems and services, and mobile dictation devices. It currently sells these solutions to more than 1,500 healthcare organizations throughout the United States. Secondly, MedQuist employs more than 4,000 skilled medical transcriptionists who process approximately 2 billion lines of text annually. The company employs more than 7,500 employees and earned $327 million in revenues in fiscal 2008.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Because of rapid growth since the early 2000s, MedQuist was looking for innovative ways to keep pace with ever-increasing system demands.

“We process more than 100,000 distinct dictated medical reports and notes per day,” said Kirk Elder, director of software engineering for MedQuist. “Our systems have to categorize them, classify them and route them through our workflow processes – from the time we receive the digital recordings until the final report is delivered to the customer.”

MedQuist currently has 10 clusters of speech recognition servers with each cluster containing 30+ servers, for a total of more than 300 servers to perform the all-important task of converting voice recordings to text-based documents. The voice recordings and related text files are than sent to medical transcriptionists (MTs) to correct and edit. After the MT finishes transcribing the report, the MedQuist platform sends the report to physicians to electronically sign the documents. Those documents are then routed back to the hospitals or clinics to printers, automated systems and/or their electronic health record (EHR) system, depending on whether the customer requires the information to be in paper or electronic form.

Before 2007, most of the MedQuist software used for this complex workflow routing was developed using various proprietary technologies, including C++ among others, making it more and more challenging to quickly respond to new market requirements and opportunities. Because MedQuist was quickly growing through acquisition, it also became difficult to efficiently incorporate the systems of newly acquired companies into the MedQuist DocQment Enterprise Platform.

“We are in the process of moving to an n-tiered SOA architecture based on Java middleware. With the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, we are positioned with the tool set to evolve our product suite towards towards SOA, without the upfront costs of re-writing everything at the same,” said Brian Ellenberger, development manager at MedQuist.

SOLUTION
Due to the economics of re-platforming a system this large, MedQuist has taken an evolutionary approach to moving its application platform to a JBoss-based environment. In fact, Elder’s group chose JBoss in 2002-2003 when their division was a separate company. At the time, there were two reasons for doing this: price and performance.

“As JBoss is open source, it was much less costly than proprietary application server options,” said Elder. “JBoss was a bargain compared to proprietary application servers.”

There were technical advantages to the platform itself. “JBoss seemed to be a very good platform for our developers, as the open architecture gave us lots of options. It was high performing too, and easy to understand,” continued Elder.

When his company was acquired by MedQuist, the IT team at the parent company evaluated what Elder’s team had done using JBoss, and was so pleased with the results, that it decided to make JBoss the platform for developing new software modules.

“We have 20 to 50 software modules that run on hundreds of servers that must all work in concert with each other,” said Kirk. “Previously, because of all the acquisitions, there was not development standards for making sure everything worked together.”

Today, the JBoss Application Server is embedded in the developer platform that Elder’s team releases to all MedQuist’s software engineering teams each quarter. “So everyone is developing software in a standard way with standard third-party libraries,” said Ellenberger. “Because we do development all over the world, this keeps us in sync and helps us maintain efficiency, while simultaneously reducing our overall development costs.”

Today, in addition to the JBoss Application Server itself, MedQuist uses Hibernate. Although just starting to use JBoss Seam for reporting, it is considering basing all future thin-client development platforms on Seam.

Underpinning all this, in mid-2007, MedQuist moved from a Microsoft Windows-based infrastructure to one based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“When we were looking to upgrade our enterprise database operating system to a more scalable, reliable, and cost-effective solution than windows, Linux was the obvious choice. We looked at which company would be a partner and help ensure our success. Red hat proved it then and every day since,” said John McKenna, Director of Software Engineering.

BENEFITS
The fact that JBoss is built using open standards has been a major boon for MedQuist. Indeed, its JBoss implementation has been so successful that MedQuist made an enterprise-wide decision to eliminate its dependence on vendor-specific solutions.

“We like the fact that JBoss is so open,” said Elder. “With the JBoss micro kernel architecture, we can even replace JBoss modules with other modules without any trouble. This allows us to avoid the vendor lock in we had experienced before.”

How critical are JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to MedQuist’s business?

“Our applications are mission critical and absolutely need to be available 24×7. Red Hat products like JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Linux just work, enabling us to focus on building industry-leading software, which in turn helps our customers reduce their costs and improve patient care,” said Dan Garnett, Vice President of Product Development, MedQuist.

The open nature of the JBoss platform has delivered other benefits as well. For example, in the case of JBoss, “His team “can debug all the way through the code, and work around and fix even the most complex development issues by utilizing the source code,” said Elder. “JBoss also integrates well into our build process. We’ve been very successful at creating build scripts that get standard JBoss environments up and running for new developers or projects very quickly and painlessly.”

Finally, Red Hat as a company has proven to be solid and reliable. “Over time, we’ve developed a solid relationship with Red Hat and JBoss, and anticipate that our partnership will only get better over time,” said Elder.

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

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

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

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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