Intel and HP Customer Success Story:

Customer: Arabian Automobiles

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

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

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

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

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

Download the Case Study PDF at Intel.com

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

IBM CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

Customer: Queensland Motorways

Industry:Travel & Transportation

Geography:Australia

Business need: Heavy traffic on Brisbane’s motorways was creating congestion, lengthening journey times for motorists and reducing travel reliability for local businesses. Toll plazas added to the problem, creating a choke point for motorists slowing to pay tolls. The Queensland Government, in conjunction with Queensland Motorways, which manages and operates the Gateway Bridge, Gateway Extension and Logan Motorways, decided to embark on a major upgrade project to enable traffic to flow more freely.

Solution:To support the Gateway Upgrade Project, Queensland Motorways wanted to implement free-flow tolling on its motorways. IBM Global Business Services was contracted to design, build, test, and deploy the intelligent free-flow tolling central system solution based on technology from IBM, SAP, Dacolian, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The SAP applications, identification, rating and interoperability applications, Internet Web portal and Oracle databases run on an IBM Power 570 server with 16 IBM POWER6 4.7GHz processors. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is used as the operating system for the entire environment.

Software: Business Integration, Energy Efficiency, Enterprise Resource Planning, IT/infrastructure, Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Service Oriented Architecture, Smarter Planet, Transforming IT, SAP

Hardware: BladeCenter H Chassis, BladeCenter HS21, Storage: DS8000, System p: Power 570.

Benefits:
The solution allows Queensland Motorways to combine its knowledge of commuters’ travel patterns with real-time data on traffic conditions to recommend fastest routes and avoid congestion. This helps to speed journeys, reduce congestion, and cut exhaust emissions. Drivers no longer have to stop to pay tolls, which reduces congestion, increases safety and enhances network reliability.

Download the PDF case study

Background
Snaking its way from the southern approaches to Brisbane city to the north of the city, the multi-lane Gateway Motorway, the most significant part of Queensland Motorways’ network and the city’s road infrastructure, bypasses the central business district to provide easy access to Brisbane’s sea- and airports and the cities of north-eastern Australia. Half-way along the route, it crosses the Brisbane River at the iconic Gateway Bridge.

“Improving traffic flow on the Gateway Motorway, and particularly on the Gateway Bridge, is key to ensuring effective network management in Brisbane,” says Phil Mumford, CEO of Queensland Motorways, the company responsible for managing and operating this road infrastructure. “Any congestion or issues on the bridge ultimately affect the whole network: people start to divert to other roads which are already carrying high traffic volumes and soon enough, everyone’s journey is negatively impacted.

“The physical upgrade is vitally necessary, but we can’t keep building multi-billion dollar infrastructure. The pattern we see is that every time a new road is built, utilization increases and congestion comes back again. We realized that to have a long-term impact on the problem, we needed to be smarter about how we manage our traffic flow.”

To tackle this problem, in early 2007 Queensland Motorways embarked on the largest bridge and road upgrade in Queensland’s history. The Gateway Upgrade Project, which will cost AU$1.88 billion (US$1.45 billion), will see the creation of a second Gateway Bridge, doubling capacity to twelve lanes, a new 7km section of motorway north of the bridges, and upgrades to 12km of motorway south of the bridges.

Improving traffic flow
While investigating ways to transform traffic management processes, the Queensland Government, together with Queensland Motorways, identified the toll plazas on the Gateway and Logan motorways as a major pinch point. The need to have vehicles either slow as they passed through the toll plazas using electronic tolling or to stop and pay with cash at a toll booth was significantly slowing the speed of traffic.

“Free-flow tolling was seen as beneficial for two reasons,” explains Phil Mumford. “First, if we could automate the tolling process and eliminate the need for drivers to stop, it would immediately increase the average speed of traffic flow, improve safety and the traveling experience of motorists. Secondly, the solution would allow us to digitally capture and analyze information about the vehicles that use our roads, which would help us make dramatic improvements to traffic management in the future.”

Leveraging IBM industry expertise
Queensland Motorways began looking for a partner that could help to design and implement such a solution, and after a series of site visits and a tender process, drew up a shortlist of three business and IT consulting companies for the delivery of the central system.

“IBM Global Business Services is one of the few companies in the world that has proven expertise in delivering successful free-flow tolling projects, and we were very impressed with their work on congestion charging in Stockholm,” says Phil Mumford. “The ability to provide an end-to-end solution including hardware, software and services – and to work effectively with other key partners such as SAP and Thales – was a key factor in our favoring the IBM proposal.

“IBM focused on aligning the business and IT resources during the project, which led to its success. What you get is a more efficient process. The business knows what they want to achieve – it just needs help to define what is required and to come up with some innovative solutions along the way. A common understanding of requirements is critical, because it means that processes that would normally consume a lot of resources become streamlined, simple and easy to understand.”

The roadside solution replaces the traditional toll booths with a Thales/Vitronic road-side gantry that utilizes video cameras and dedicated short-range communication technologies to capture information on passing vehicles. Vehicles are identified either by an in-vehicle tag or by analyzing footage of their number plates using two optical character recognition (OCR) engines, one at the roadside and a Dacolian engine at the central system.

The vehicle data is then matched to the appropriate customer account, and an IBM-developed rating engine assesses how much money is owed. The billing information is passed to back-end SAP ERP Financials and SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, which either deduct the total from a prepaid customer account, or generate an invoice. Business reporting is handled by SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, and integration by SAP NetWeaver Process Integration.

“The whole process is automated and instantaneous, and there is no need for drivers to stop to pay their toll,” explains Phil Mumford. “Moreover, except in certain cases where a vehicle cannot be identified by OCR, there is no need for manual intervention by our staff. This not only improves traffic flow – it also cuts down the cost per transaction, which will help us offer better value to our customers.”

Transforming customer service
More importantly, the introduction of the SAP CRM application is leading to a fundamental change in the way Queensland Motorways interacts with its customers. Now it can see what vehicles are using the roads and how often and at what times they use the roads. In the future, Queensland Motorways will be able to tailor its services to individual drivers – with a profound effect on both customer experience and traffic management.

“With SAP CRM, we have achieved a better understanding of who our customers are,” says Phil Mumford. “In the future we’ll be able to offer customers useful information about the transport network. For example, a customer making regular trips to the airport on a Monday morning may want to receive congestion reports direct to their phones. The whole experience has the potential to be much more personalized.

“The idea is to have ‘a motorway that thinks’ – a more intelligent solution that will give our customers a better range of options for their journeys.”

Some of these ideas are still on the drawing board, but with the launch of the free-flow tolling system, motorists, the paying customers, now have access to a wide range of information and features via a Web portal and SMS.

This enables them to review usage information, pay bills and top up credit online. Similarly, business users are able to obtain information on all the vehicles in their fleet, and pay for the total road usage from a single account.

Exploring the technical architecture
The infrastructure of the solution is split across three locations: the road-side systems, the primary data center, and a disaster recovery site.

At the road-side, all sensor equipment with integrated pre-processing systems – vehicle classification, vehicle imaging, DSRC beacons and the detection and tracking unit – are installed on a single accessible gantry with no in-road installation.

Data from each of the roadside subsystems is passed to a Toll Management Unit housed in a roadside shelter where it is combined to form individual passage reports which are then passed via IBM WebSphere MQ to an enterprise service bus (ESB) based on WebSphere Message Broker and SAP NetWeaver Process Integration.

The passage report is then passed to the identification and rating engine, which uses OCR technology from Dacolian to identify the vehicle and to verify the OCR result achieved by the roadside system.

Images which cannot be analyzed automatically with the required confidence level are manually processed in a manual image review application. From there, billing information is passed via the ESB into the SAP CRM and SAP ERP systems. The free-flow tolling system adheres to the latest Australian interoperability standards, and data is automatically exchanged with other operators.

The solution also includes an intranet portal built on SAP NetWeaver Portal, which is accessed by internal users. IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-On provides secure, convenient access to the portal and to other resources: a single password is used to access all services, and users only need to sign in once. This helps Queensland Motorways safeguard sensitive customer and business data, without introducing a complex security infrastructure and reducing usability.

A self-service Web portal has been developed to provide access for Queensland Motorways’ customers to payment options, account status and other important information. IBM WebSphere Application Server provides the platform for the delivery of this portal.

Service-oriented architecture
IBM Global Business Services has designed and built the solution in accordance with the principles of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Individual systems communicate via the ESB rather than specialized point-to-point interfaces. As a result, any component can be replaced or upgraded without affecting other systems, and components can be orchestrated in different ways to provide new services without the need for significant custom development effort.

“We know that our needs will change over time,” says Phil Mumford. “The beauty of the SOA solution is that we can change our components as needed, seamlessly. It might be about introducing a new piece of technology; it might be a business process or a whole new business model. It changes the way we think about our technology lifecycles.”

Central system servers and storage
The Dacolian servers, Web servers, and various other systems such as IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-On, run on 25 Intel Xeon processor-based IBM HS21 blade servers in two IBM BladeCenter chassis.

Meanwhile, the SAP applications, identification, rating and interoperability applications, Internet Web portal and Oracle databases run on an IBM Power 570 server with 16 IBM POWER6 4.7GHz processors. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is used as the operating system for the entire environment.

A storage area network, based on IBM System Storage DS8000 hardware, provides high-speed access to data. By using a combination of Fibre Channel and FATA disks, the company can obtain the most effective balance between high-performance and cost-effective storage.
The complete production infrastructure is mirrored with identical hardware at the disaster recovery site, which is used to run development, test and staging environments during normal operations. IBM Global Technology Services was responsible for designing, implementing and testing the entire infrastructure at both the primary and disaster recovery sites.

PowerVM and BladeCenter
The Power 570 servers leverage IBM PowerVM technologies to provide an autonomic, virtualized server environment. The SAP applications and databases run in separate logical partitions (LPARs) that dynamically allocate available processor resources to maximize overall system throughput and enable load balancing and peak load compensation.

As a result, Queensland Motorways has enough flexibility in its infrastructure to ensure its tolling service runs 24×7x365. Even when server maintenance is necessary at the main data center, workload can be moved to a standby server at the disaster recovery site until the production machine is back online.

This flexibility is complemented by the highly scalable IBM BladeCenter platform, which allows Queensland Motorways to upgrade its processing capabilities simply by plugging additional blade servers into the chassis. For example, if the company decides to extend the free-flow tolling solution, and this requires more Dacolian OCR servers to be installed, the BladeCenter infrastructure will enable rapid expansion at minimal cost.

This dynamic infrastructure gives Queensland Motorways the flexibility to extend and grow the solution to meet the changing demands of the business.

Looking to the future
The free-flow tolling solution is on course to deliver rapid benefits for both Queensland Motorways and the motorists of south-east Queensland – increasing the reliability and safety of travel on its motorways, and significantly improving operational efficiency, which should help the company to deliver improved services and better value.

Looking at the big picture, Phil Mumford believes that the best is still to come: “Under our old systems, we didn’t have the flexibility to obtain some of the data that will greatly assist us make better business decisions. We now also have a system that will enable us to offer tailor-made solutions to our customers – total flexibility, total mobility.”

“Moving forward our customers will have access to information such as projected travel times, and our systems will help them to make informed travel decisions.”

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: Airlines/Travel

Geography: The Netherlands

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FAST FACTS

Company: AutoTrader.com

Industry: Automotive information and sales

Geography: Atlanta

Business Challenge: Rock-solid support needed to move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and off-the-shelf applications

Solution: Subscribe to Red Hat’s Technical Account Management (TAM) service, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite

Benefits: Smooth migration to a new IT infrastructure. Immediate response to questions and issues regarding Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Direct access to senior Red Hat technical expertise. Improved productivity of internal IT support staff.

“Any company that has anything important running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux would benefit from a TAM. Even in times like these, when additional expenditures are difficult to justify, the TAM service is worth every penny. It more than pays for itself in the time it saves and the competitive edge it provides.”
–Mark Juliano, UNIX Systems Manager, AutoTrader.com

Download the Case Study [PDF]

BACKGROUND

AutoTrader.com was launched in 1998 and over the past 10 years has grown into the Internet’s leading marketplace and information portal for automotive products and services. Today, AutoTrader.com brings more than four million vehicle listings from 40,000 dealers and 250,000 private owners together with more than 14 million qualified buyers each month. By leveraging high-tech merchandising techniques that incorporate images, videos, and sophisticated search capabilities, AutoTrader.com makes it easier, quicker, and more cost-effective for people to research, find, and buy and sell new and used vehicles.

In addition to vehicle pricing – including seller specials and dealer discounts – AutoTrader.com posts safety information and provides vehicle history reports, and offers insight into the auto buying process with information on financing, auto loans and more. In August, 2008, AutoTrader.com ranked highest in satisfying dealers with new-vehicle leads for the second year in a row, according to the 2008 J.D. Power and Associates Dealer Satisfaction with Online Buying Services Study.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

In 2004, AutoTrader.com made a strategic decision to move away from developing home-grown systems toward deployment of off-the-shelf applications. At the same time, the firm wanted to migrate off high-end proprietary SPARC servers to commodity x86 machines, primarily for cost reasons.

“We very much wanted to change to a buy-versus-build mentality for applications, and in the process wanted to move away from legacy UNIX operating systems tied to proprietary hardware that were costly and difficult to maintain,” said Mark Juliano, UNIX systems manager for AutoTrader.com. Open source Linux was the obvious answer, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the obvious top choice of Linux distribution.

“We did our homework, and Red Hat came out on top,” said Juliano. Not only is Red Hat the No. 1 Linux provider, but it offers infrastructure management capabilities and toolsets– via its Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite systems management solution – that are unequaled among Linux vendors. “And then there was the fact that just about every independent software vendor (ISV) supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” Juliano said. Currently, AutoTrader.com is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on more than 350 x86 servers.

But although Juliano’s staff had extensive experience with Solaris and other variations of UNIX, none of the other internal IT staff members were familiar with Linux. Complicating matters, AutoTrader.com was in the process of implementing a strategic, corporate-wide service-oriented architecture (SOA) using an enterprise service bus (ESB) that “had a lot of visibility within the company,” said Juliano. “That project was too important for us to take any risks with it.”

SOLUTION

To get the extra support it desired to help enable a simpler and streamlined transition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SOA, AutoTrader.com subscribed to the Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM) service. This value-added offering is designed for Red Hat customers that desire a highly personalized support relationship with Red Hat. By subscribing to the TAM service, companies get a primary technical contact at Red Hat who works with them to understand their ongoing technology requirements and provide trusted advice that enables them to optimize their Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. As companies’ single point of accountability when faced with mission-critical systems issues, the TAM tailors support for customers’ unique technical and business environments; acts as an advocate for them within Red Hat; and facilitates collaboration with other vendors.

BENEFITS

Although it originally intended to subscribe to the TAM service for only one year – “to get that extra support we needed,” said Juliano – the experience was so positive and the return on investment (ROI) so great that AutoTrader.com promptly renewed the contract for three more years.

“My estimate is that every time we call our TAM, we get an immediate solution 80 percent of the time,” said Juliano. “That’s not just saying he picks up the phone – although that kind of responsiveness would be impressive under any circumstances – it’s that he provides us with a solution during that first exchange.” This is especially critical given that AutoTrader.com has a technically sophisticated in-house support staff that attempts to troubleshoot any problems before getting the TAM involved. “My staff really knows what they’re doing, and have already tried 20 different solutions before they come to me for help,” said Juliano. “And when they ask for help, they need it at a very high level, and very, very quickly,” said Juliano. The fact that the TAM is intimately familiar with AutoTrader.com’s hardware and software infrastructure is critical to making this work so well, he said.

The TAM service has also enabled AutoTrader.com to be more flexible in a highly competitive marketplace. “Historically, flexibility has been our biggest competitive advantage,” said Juliano. “Our ability to rapidly develop new systems that provide our users with additional functionality is key to our success, and our TAM helps us achieve this.”

Juliano said he can’t recommend the TAM service more highly. “Any company that has anything important running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux would benefit from a TAM,” he said. “Even in times like these, when additional expenditures are difficult to justify, the TAM service is worth every penny. It more than pays for itself in the time it saves, and the competitive edge it provides.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Transportation

Geography: The Netherlands

Business challenge: Maintaining an uninterrupted rail service. Realizing an uptime of 100 percent.

Migration Path: Migrating existing applications, including those that suffered problems with the performance of BEA Weblogic on OpenVMS. Building new applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Red Hat Global File System with cluster environment, Red Hat Directory Server, Red Hat Network Provisioning Module, Red Hat Certificate System, Red Hat Consulting, and Red Hat Training and Certification.

Benefits: Easy update policy, stable system, 100 percent uptime in the first quarter of 2008

”We wanted a stable, robust, yet flexible infrastructure and finally chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We also selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for most new projects as the Red Hat operating system best suits our requirements and objectives for future business plans.”
– Mike Bos, infrastructure manager, ProRail

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
ProRail manages the rail infrastructure in the Netherlands and is responsible for the Dutch railway network. The organization came into being through a merger of three organizations: the former Railinfrabeheer (responsible for rail maintenance and construction), Railverkeersleiding (rail traffic management), and Railned (rail capacity planning).

ProRail has been active since 1 January 2003. The organization has 2,600 employees who run the railway network, and guarantee reliability and safety. The rail infrastructure manager has an operating area of about 6,500 kilometres of track and carries 1.2 million passengers and 100,000 tons of goods every day. This makes the 6,500 kilometres of railway track in The Netherlands among the most used in the world.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
A failure in the system at ProRail has far-reaching consequences and represents a substantial loss for and industry commerce alike.

The technical challenge for ProRail, and the basis for achieving 100 percent uptime, was the introduction of a sound operating system. This means that the application has no unplanned downtime. ProRail works with OpenVMS (Virtual Memory System), a high-end computer system originally designed by Digital Equipment Corporation and now sold by HP.

OpenVMS, a multi-user, multiprocessing virtual memory-based operating system, functions satisfactorily. But in early 2000, the system was no longer available for all the products that ProRail wanted to launch.

Mike Bos, infrastructure manager at ProRail, explains: “At the time Open VMS was running behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows in terms of layered product applications available. The J2EE applications had performance issues. The need arose for a second operating system. With the addition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we are moving to a shorter time to market model.”

SOLUTION
ProRail did not intend to replace the existing OpenVMS with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “It would have been an enormous job to migrate every existing application,” said Bos. “The applications that were easily migrated and/or had problems have been migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

Another decision ProRail made was to allow each new application to be built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “After all, you have to use the best tool for the job. We are working to achieve long-term objectives,” said Bos.

Red Hat assisted ProRail by implementing Red Hat Network Satellite for the testing and training environment. With Red Hat Network Satellite, different ‘virtual’ systems can be controlled as a single system. This means that systems can be added to a controlled environment. The ProRail IT network is spread across The Netherlands in 13 local offices. Red Hat Network proxies have been set up at those locations. Every system is installed and managed by the central Red Hat Network architecture, including custom software which needs to be delivered in RPM format by the projects. ProRail also acquired a mix of Premium and Basic Red Hat Enterprise Linux support subscriptions.

Pro Rail is also using Red Hat Global File System. Global File System contains embedded clusters, jointly providing an integrated software framework. ProRail needed to design a complete infrastructure for a new open source solution within its data centres. To help define the organization’s needs and design this new architecture, ProRail engaged Red Hat Global Professional Services, Red Hat’s consulting practice. The new architecture consists of an array of Red Hat tools and software, including:

• Red Hat Network products for provisioning and management
• Default installation profiles that consist of only the products needed by ProRail
• Red Hat Directory Server providing multiple master setup for the centralized user management and application needs.
• Default Red Hat Cluster Suite setups, including Global File System as shared file system with Oracle Real Application cluster
• Default High-Availability Loadbalancer setup (active/backup)
• Develop custom applications for current monitoring systems
• Plans call for Certificate System to be implemented Global Professional Services helped ProRail to develop a custom default architecture design to
  maximize its technology investment.

A Red Hat Consultant, specifically a Dedicated Enterprise Engineer (DEE), installed the framework within the production environment and continues to perform third-level support on-site at ProRail.

The DEE is also responsible for product development and implementing new products from which ProRail can profit. Examples include:

1. Creating a default workstation install, from which several different workstations could be installed. Before this, every workstation type (differs by application use), had its own installation profile and was built by different partners, so every setup looked different and cost a lot in maintenance effort. The new default modular approach significantly reduces maintenance costs.
2. Virtualization setup within the test/training environment. This makes it possible to mix test setups and training instances on a small amount of hardware and is a good start ahead of Proof of Concept for virtualization within the production architecture. ProRail asked Red Hat to help them define the skills needed and execute a training program giving ProRail’s system administrators the appropriate knowledge to support projects which would use the new architecture and set the default framework in production. This service was also delivered by its (DEE) consultant. Together with the Red Hat DEE, ProRail set up a training track for the current operations managers, so they can cover first-line support on the new architecture using Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) skills. To get the maximum performance out of the system, the operations managers at ProRail had to take two Red Hat training courses. “We wanted our people to benefit from thorough training and examination,” said Bos. Besides training its own personnel, for second-line support ProRail hired Red Hat Certified Engineers (RHCEs).

BENEFITS
Thanks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, ProRail now has a stable and flexible environment. In the first quarter of 2008, Red Hat Enterprise Linux satisfied the requirement of an uptime of 100 percent. “There have been no incidents so far. Hopefully, by the end of 2008, we can realize our goals. Thanks to Red Hat,” said Bos.

The maturity and robustness of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is important to ProRail.

“We don’t want any new, unproven products. Infrastructure managers are conservative,” said Bos. “Red Hat’s expanding presence in the market is proof of its reliability, and we know that the system is viable for a long lifecycle.”

Bos praises Red Hat’s update policy too. “Updates can be done very easily with Red Hat. With Red Hat we created a more flexible, reliable environment which is easy to maintain and this leaves us free to concentrate on new projects. We’re very happy with the flexibility and reliability we’ve achieved with Red Hat.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Car rental

Geography: EMEA

Business Challenge: To replace Avis’ costly proprietary software with reliable open source solutions to reduce acquisition and ongoing costs for the organization’s IT department

Migration Path: Proprietary Sun hardware with Solaris and Weblogic-based application server platforms to a more cost-effective and flexible platform based on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform running on Windows Server 2003

Hardware: Wintel environment incorporating Dell hardware, Intel-based dual-CPU, quad-core machines with 8-16Gigs of RAM, Windows Server 2003 32bit and 64bit

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Hibernate framework

Benefits: Experienced significantly reduced TCO of at least 50 percent from reduced maintenance costs, as well as increased licensing flexibility and reconfigurability and decreased server load

“Avis has absolute trust in JBoss and its mission-critical enterprise applications. We are very satisfied with the results that we’ve achieved since migrating to JBoss solutions.”
–Jens Utech, Director Revenue and Fleet Applications at Avis.

Download the case study [<strongPDF]

BACKGROUND
Avis Europe is a leading car rental company with a presence in Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia. It serves over eight million customers per year via the Avis and Budget brands in over 3,800 locations. Avis holds leading positions in many markets in Western Europe, with approximately 80 percent of its revenues generated in the five major markets of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK.

OPPORTUNITY
Avis’ revenue management system, undoubtedly the organization’s predominant application affecting main business function, is used to conduct forecasting for business areas including future demand for car rental, the best placement of cars for rental services, what types of customers to target, and pricing decisions. Used in over 500 stations across Europe, the system needed to be upgraded and simplified to enable ease of use.

Avis’ station application, allowing agents to check in cars via handheld devices, and the company’s system for printing rental agreements both also needed to be optimized. The previous processes were conducted in-station using noncompliant, non-customer friendly, and incumbent systems.

In 2006, Avis recognized the need to replace these expensive, incumbent systems based on proprietary software with a reliable and affordable alternative. Though it had little experience with open source solutions, it decided to migrate its proprietary Solaris and combined BEA and Weblogic application server platform based on Sun hardware to the more cost-effective and flexible platform offered by open source solutions.

SOLUTION
Avis evaluated a number of open source solutions that could offer reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), expanded flexibility, and unmatched scalability. Avis required a J2EE-compliant Application Server on the Windows platform that offered support and a related monitoring and management infrastructure.

Ultimately, Avis selected a Wintel environment combining Dell hardware, Windows Server 2003, and JBoss Enterprise Application Server. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform also incorporated the use of JBoss Operations Network for monitoring activities.

The solution ecosystem consists of Windows Server 2003 32bit and 64bit, JBoss Enterprise Application Server, and SQL Server 2005. The overall solution includes 10 production servers used for the organizations revenue-management systems. Half of these solutions are based on JBoss Application Server, and all use the Hibernate framework.

The migration involved no integration with the incumbent platform, and was a full-system port. The process operated on a phased, three-year timeline with iterative releases occurring approximately every three months. No system integrators or value-added resellers were leverage during the migration process, as all development was done in-house.

Avis used consultants to aid the smooth implementation of JBoss Operations Network Server monitoring and management. This allowed the company to rapidly incorporate the tool without having to invest heavily in administration and installation internally.

BENEFITS
Avis selected JBoss solutions for the offering of reduced TCO and increased performance, flexibility, and availability of resources with familiarity in the market.

One of the distinct advantages of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is that it enables ease-of-use for development. The solution integrates easily with IntelliJ IDEA, and Avis’ development cycle, and Avis employees are now able to run the JBoss platforms on their personal laptops.

The platform has enabled significant development efficiency and developers are more effective running JBoss in their processes and taking advantage of the full IDE integrationand very rapid start-up times. The time required for startup with the new JBoss-based system has been reduced considerably. Now, with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Avis can quickly and easily add new servers to its architecture. The new architecture has allowed Avis to buy, deploy, and redeploy additional servers at very competitive prices.

In addition to reduced TCO amounting to savings of at least 50 percent of original costs, Avis also achieved enhanced performance from its newly implemented JBoss platform.

“It’s now definitely easier to scale a number of CPUs up and down in the current model and the system really brings us a lot of value, especially in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in the development process. We have saved at least 50 percent on TCO,” said Jens Utech, Director Revenue and Fleet Applications at Avis. “Thanks to JBoss’ integration with the development tools and the ability for the developer to work in very flexible ways, common development tasks around deploying, re-deploying, and generally working are three to four times faster with JBoss than any of the competitors.”

“Avis has absolute trust in JBoss and its mission-critical enterprise applications. We are very satisfied with the results and we are also impressed with JBoss support. We are provided with very professional, very prompt, and very helpful answers as opposed to the usual vendor nonsense. We use the support portal website as well,” said Utech.

In addition to all of the valuable benefits delivered by JBoss solutions, Avis also found that many of its development staff perceived the use of JBoss and open source solutions in general as very positive. This has led to increased motivation and expanded recruiting for Avis’ internal staff.

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FAST FACTS

Industry: Travel

Geography: Global

Business Challenge: To increase performance, reduce costs, and expand scalability for a mission-critical, rapidly evolving IT architecture requiring 100 percent uptime

Migration Path: Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Hardware: HPx86 and Intel

Benefits: Achieved system reliability, 90 percent cost savings, 3x performance gains, and unmatched scalability, while standardizing its IT infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Sabre Holdings is a privately held world leader in the travel marketplace that is owned by Silver Lake and TPG. It merchandises and retails travel products and provides distribution and technology solutions for the travel industry. Headquartered in Southlake, Texas, the company maintains approximately 9,000 employees located across 59 countries.

In 2006, Sabre Holdings earned $2.8 billion in revenue as it supported travellers, travel agents, corporations, and travel suppliers around the world through its three companies: Travelocity, the most popular online travel service offering consumer-direct services for the leisure and business traveller; Sabre Travel Network, responsible for marketing and distributing travel-related products and services through its travel agency and corporate channels; and Sabre Airline Solutions, the world’s largest provider of software products with over 200 airlines relying on its passenger solutions and consulting services.

The first automated passenger reservation system offered by Sabre Holdings was installed in 1960 and marked a dramatic technological leap forward for the airline industry. Since then, Sabre Holdings has pioneered technological advances for the industry in areas such as revenue management, pricing, flight scheduling, cargo, flight operations, and crew scheduling.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
For years, Sabre Holdings utlized proprietary solutions to support its advanced IT architecture. Internet-based travel bookings were gaining rapid acceptance among a growing segment of customers and travellers demanding more services and better options were driving up costs for the worldwide travel leader. To capitalize on its enormous growth opportunity, the company needed an infrastructure that was faster, cheaper and more scalable. Looking to increase performance and reduce technology costs associated with proprietary solutions, Sabre Holdings decided to investigate open source alternatives to help it face the relentless conditions of a fast-moving, challenging travel industry.

“While operating the largest travel distribution service in the world that processes tens of thousands of transactions per second, it’s always a peak business hour somewhere and we need to be available 24×7,” said Robert Wiseman, chief technology officer at Sabre Holdings. “This creates heavy demands on our IT infrastructure and presents challenges, but with Red Hat we are able to build stronger and smarter systems with our global customers in mind.”

SOLUTION
Enabling more than 32,000 transactions per second, Sabre Holdings’ IT infrastructure demanded 100 percent uptime. If its systems were to experience downtime, the result would be disastrous with planes grounded, passengers stranded, and trips unable to be booked.

To improve the stability, performance, and cost-effectiveness of its IT infrastructure and to ensure reliability for its own customers, Sabre Holdings turned to open source solutions. It evaluated the leading Linux offerings on the market, but ultimately chose Red Hat for its established market leadership and renowned support offerings. With Red Hat, Sabre Holdings also discovered the power of the developer community that could provide reliable, consistent updates and fixes that could be incorporated in realtime.

“We selected the IT solution that would allow us to run our business most effectively. Our customers use our services for the content, speed, price, and presentation, not for the operating system our business runs on,” said Josh Hartman, chief technology officer at Travelocity. “Red Hat provides a proficient and effervescent experience for our customers, who don’t even realize that Red Hat is there. And that’s the way it should be.”

With millions of online customers completing tens of thousands of transactions per second, Sabre Holdings has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux on thousands of HP x86-based servers and it continues to expand its use of Red Hat solutions today.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux is our corporate standard – as we purchase hardware and build systems, they are required to work seamlessly with Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said Wiseman. “Our systems now perform three times faster while costing 90 percent less when compared side-by-side to other providers.”

When Sabre Holdings recently acquired lastminute.com, a leader in European online travel, its IT system included over 1,000 servers running numerous free open source operating systems that required significant time and resources to operate and maintain. Today, Sabre Holdings is in the process of migrating all of lastminute.com’s servers to its corporate standard, Red Hat Enterpise Linux 5.

BENEFITS
Since migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sabre Holdings has benefited from system reliability, cost savings, increased performance, and scalability.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled Sabre Holdings to standardize its IT architecture, consisting of thousands of systems worldwide, across all three of its companies’ IT infrastructures. “Red Hat has allowed us to horizontally scale our systems with the ability to drive thousands of transactions per second, 24×7, 365 days a year,” said Hartman. “Red Hat is the leader in the marketplace and offers the performance and stability to drive our high-transaction business at a high economic value.” In addition to the performance improvements and cost savings realized since migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sabre Holdings also further strengthened its position as an innovative technology leader and employer. Working with open source technology partners has allowed Sabre Holdings to recruit and retain the best talent.

“Our team at Sabre Holdings is unparalleled in the industry, we are the leading travel services provider and our use of open source software attracts IT leaders to our company,” Wiseman said. From building the first computer reservation system in the 1960s, to blazing the trail for online travel in the 1990s, to delivering the sophisticated, cutting-edge travel solutions of today, Sabre Holdings has made innovation its business. “With decades of experience in the travel service industry, we built a culture of uptime and reliable performance. Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has allowed us to focus on our core business competencies,” said Wiseman.

“Sabre Holdings relies on Red Hat as our corporate standard operating system for our mission-critical IT infrastructure.” As it continues to evolve its IT architecture, Sabre Holdings plans to incorporate additional Red Hat solutions and is currently assessing Red Hat integrated virtualization technology. “We are beginning to take a close look at Red Hat’s virtualization capabilities and have been impressed with its recent virtualization management technology development. We’re also interested in flexible deployments of Red Hat on Amazon’s elastic cloud,” said Wiseman. “We value Red Hat as a long-term partner in our development of Sabre Holdings’ corporate IT goals because of the visionary, leadership role Red Hat plays in the open source community.”

Airport migrates servers and desktops to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Network

Raleigh, NC – August 6, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Munich Airport, recognized for three consecutive years as Europe’s “Airport of the Year” by air transport research company Skytrax, has migrated a large portion of its UNIX servers and desktops to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Airport has since realized heightened performance, cost savings and reliable support.

After experiencing consistent performance issues, Munich Airport conducted detailed cost-analysis research on alternative technology solutions that could boost performance for its IT systems. Results revealed that Red Hat Enterprise Linux, already in small use in the Airport’s IT systems, could provide both the savings and performance benefits desired. In 2005, Munich Airport migrated a portion of its servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and in March 2006, it also migrated most of its desktop workstations to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop. Since September 2006, Munich Airport has equipped more than 30 servers and 40 desktops to run using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat-based systems are also used by Airport’s external mail gateways providing anti-virus and anti-spam functionality.

Munich Airport’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop solution plays an important role in airport operations, providing the control tower with technology to ensure smooth, automated aircraft dispatch and passenger-handling sequences. The system coordinates aircraft parking spaces, taking raw data from the radar system as input, and using this data to calculate aircraft arrival times and coordinate logistical activities on the ground.

For server and desktop administration, Munich Airport also uses Red Hat Network in conjunction with Red Hat Satellite Server. “Red Hat was also able to score with Red Hat Network against other Linux vendors, who had nothing comparable to offer at the time when the decision to select Red Hat was made,” said Hubert Bosl, Unix system administrator at Munich Airport and a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). “In the mid-run, we will also use Red Hat Network to manage the systems which still run on proprietary Unix. Moreover, this management tool was extremely important for our ISO 20000 certification.”

In 2007, Munich Airport served 34 million passengers and was ranked the 28th busiest airport worldwide. It aims to become the most efficient and attractive European airport hub by 2010 and expects that the implementation of Red Hat solutions will help expedite this goal. Currently, Munich Airport is also running another large-scale project together with Red Hat solutions. The main components of the Universal Display System in the Airport’s Terminal 1 has more than 1,400 display devices providing passengers with up-to-date information on arrivals and departures, and these servers are now running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Munich Airport is a worldwide market leader in many respects. We are therefore especially delighted that it deploys Red Hat Enterprise Linux, particularly on its traffic-critical systems,” said Werner Knoblich, vice president, EMEA at Red Hat. “We are proud that the reliability, manageability and security of our operating system have contributed to the airport’s top rank for service and customer satisfaction.”

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

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
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FAST FACTS

Industry: Automotive Manufacturing

Challenge: To reconfigure and consolidate Renault’s UK micro-site hosting requirements

Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: Consolidated all UK micro-sites on a single platform. Reduced on-going costs. Guaranteed improved customer experience. Enhanced scalability, and increased control.

The challenge: Increased server security

“We realized that we were in fact running a serious risk of losing control of our web-based operations if we failed to reconfigure outdated server technology that did not offer us the security, stability, or future-proofing we required to back-up this mission-critical online interface.” – Ian Collins, Operations Manager, Renault UK

While the Internet is becoming increasingly integral to corporate promotional strategies, a similar increase in technology investment to support those strategies is often lacking. This lack of investment and attention to web infrastructure has meant that many companies have found it hard to maintain the desired levels of control over their web-based activities or to ensure the continuous availability of online information to customers.

As the Internet became part of the car and van manufacturer’s front-line marketing strategy, Renault recognized the need to consolidate its individual UK micro sites to cut costs, use server space more economically, and manage the online presence more efficiently.

“Failure to evaluate the processes surrounding our operating systems and web hosting solutions could ultimately jeopardize the sustainability of our business,” said Ian Collins, Operations Manager, Renault UK. “Our traditional policy of allowing creative agencies to host individual micro sites became increasingly impractical and costly as our reliance on the Internet grew. We realized that we were in fact running a serious risk of losing control of our web-based operations if we failed to reconfigure outdated server technology that did not offer us the security, stability, or future-proofing we required to back-up this mission-critical online interface.”

The solution: Managed web hosting backed by Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rackspace has given us a true enterprise-class platform offering. Safe in the knowledge that our operating system and IT infrastructure have been optimised, we can now focus all our attention on our core business.

Based on a recommendation from one of its creative agencies, Renault chose a solution from Rackspace Managed Hosting based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Entrusting thousands of its customers’ web servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network, Rackspace Managed Hosting has been able to pass on the benefits of open source technology directly to Renault. Live in just weeks, the solution consolidated Renault’s complex web server configurations and simultaneously allowed full scalability and easy management of the IT infrastructure. Because of the 12-18 month testing and release cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Renault is confident that they have now created the most reliable, future-proofed environment possible for its web presence.

“Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rackspace has given us a true enterprise-class platform offering. Safe in the knowledge that our operating system and IT infrastructure have been optimised, we can now focus all our attention on our core business,” Collins said

In a complete transformation of the operating network, Red Hat’s open source technology provides Renault with a fail-safe mechanism to run its web operations, guaranteeing continual network availability of online information to customers.

Growth and support

“Besides the technical improvement to our operations, we also benefit from a bundled support system that gives us increased peace of mind above and beyond the enhancements within the IT infrastructure. Although the likelihood of problems with our web-based activity has been much reduced as a result of this solution, we know that professional, around-the-clock support is at hand should we require it.”

Renault’s fully integrated enterprise software solution is backed by world-class support. Being the first managed hosting provider to offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux and having one of the largest installed bases of Red Hat technology in the world, Rackspace is uniquely positioned to provide top-tier assistance, drawing expertise from its sizeable pool of talented Red Hat Certified Engineers.

“Besides the technical improvement to our operations, we also benefit from a bundled support system that gives us increased peace of mind above and beyond the enhancements within the IT infrastructure,” Collins sai. “Although the likelihood of problems with our web-based activity has been much reduced as a result of this solution, we know that professional, around-the-clock support is at hand should we require it.”

Rackspace relies on Red Hat Network to manage its Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers, ensuring that Renault can be kept up-to-date with the latest security patches and management tools and that the systems it depends on to stay current. The close relationship between Red Hat and Rackspace allows their joint offering to scale further than solutions offered by competitors, giving them the ability to meet Renault’s future business requirements.

Measure of success

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed to perform well in any mission-critical deployment, offering value through enhanced manageability of IT infrastructure, open source scalability, improved security, and a high level of dependability. Avoiding the on-going need to fix IT problems, Renault has:

• Reduced the ‘behind-the-scenes cost’ of their web presence
• Lowered long-term IT spend considerably
• Continued to improve the customer experience

The efficiency of Red Hat Enterprise Linux safeguards operations. It allows Renault to keep the cost of running its servers extremely low while keeping service availability extremely high. In turn, this frees up more IT budget for new services and products, helping the company build its customer base for the future.