COMPANY: Union Bank, N.A.

CATEGORY: Superior Alternatives

INDUSTRY: Financial Services

GEOGRAPHY: Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: An aging and costly IT infrastructure was impeding the ability of Union Bank to scale to growth and respond agilely to changing market dynamics

MIGRATION PATH: UNIX™ on high-end RISC machines to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based HP servers; Websphere to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux™, Red Hat Network Satellite, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform™, JBoss Seam, JBoss Hibernate, Red Hat Consulting

HARDWARE: More than 150 Intel™ Xeon™ processor-based HP ProLiant servers

BENEFITS: Improve reliability and scalability, cut costs, and deliver new financial services and products to market faster

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BACKGROUND
Union Bank, N.A., headquartered in San Francisco is a full-service commercial bank providing an array of financial services to individuals, small businesses, middle-market companies, and major corporations. Union Bank is California’s fifth-largest bank by deposits. The bank has 335 banking offices in California, Oregon, and Washington and two international offices. Its holding company, UnionBanCal Corporation, is the 16th largest commercial bank holding company in the U.S. based on assets at March 31, 2009.

Union Bank was selected for its operating platform migration from AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Websphere to JBoss to support its mission critical applications at an improved price with greater performance and less up-keep. Union Bank used open source solutions to increase time to market, reliability and return on investment.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
When Mok Choe joined Union Bank in early 2007 as chief technology officer, the Union Bank IT infrastructure faced a host of challenges similar to those of many other companies at the time, mainly increasing costs and resources associated with the maintenance and upkeep of legacy systems.

Over the years, Union Bank’s IT infrastructure had grown increasingly large, cumbersome, and complex. Not only was it costly to operate and maintain, but it couldn’t scale to accommodate the bank’s rapid expansion into new markets. System availability was also a continuing challenge. And as the financial services industry expanded into electronic banking products, Union Bank’s reliance on IT was increasing. The bank thus required an IT infrastructure that could speed new products to market with rock-solid reliability and availability, and which could also scale as needed.

The hardware environment embraced a “big box” approach with a few massive servers at strategic locations that offered little relief when significant impacts occurred. This environment required tremendous overhead with constant monitoring and management of server problems.

The IT department at Union Bank was also under pressure to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of its overall IT operations. The solution needed to deliver a robust disaster recovery environment with minimal mean-time-to-restore (MTTR) and maximum mean-time-between-failures (MTBF) times. Finally, the solution needed to better leverage Union Bank’s most highly skilled IT workers. By enabling valued staff workers to reduce the day-to-day support required by overhead-intensive legacy systems, productivity would improve, and the bank’s IT department could move from a reaction to proactive support model.

“First and foremost, we needed to improve system availability,” said Choe. “Secondly, we needed to speed time to market of new financial services products. And at the end of the day, we needed to decrease the cost per transaction of delivering services.”

SOLUTION
Union Bank immediately focused on the task of establishing a new and innovative technology environment. The first decision: to create a new open source-based enterprisewide IT platform to obtain improved availability, agility, scalability and reduced TCO (total cost of ownership), while enabling the support of the bank’s growing IT needs and better alignment with the bank’s overall business plan.

“We did three specific things,” said Choe. “First, we migrated our entire Web-based infrastructure over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so we could go from a scale-up to a scale-out architecture. Next, we ported our teller platform over to JBoss. And third, we wrote a brand new Web-based cash management application built on the entire Red Hat technology stack: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss, Hibernate, and SEAM.”

The strategy started at the operating platform level by replacing the aging UNIX based RISC servers with commodity x86 machines running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and migrating to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform at the application server level. Union Bank initially utilized Red Hat Network to set up centralized, secure management of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

Union Bank took advantage of Red Hat Consulting to assist the IT group with the initial design of the first phases of deploying the new architecture and Web-based applications. The bank’s infrastructure and application development teams attended Red Hat Training to learn valuable tools and lessons on integration and migration issues.

The new strategy also encompassed building a new data center that leveraged virtualization technology on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to dramatically reduce the bank’s hardware footprint. “The bank is very serious about its green initiative, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a key part of that,” said Choe.

One of the most strategic projects was to replace the bank’s operating system environment on branch teller systems with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Within just months, the Union Bank development staff was able to create a “silent” JBoss deployment package and distribute it remotely to over 330 production branch servers.

“The JBoss-based teller application has been running successfully at the 330 branch sites ever since,” said Choe, “The small footprint of JBoss has freed up much needed space on each branch server and has laid the ground work for future expansion. We plan to migrate other customer-facing web applications from Websphere to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.”

BENEFITS
Union Bank’s innovative approach to its IT re-architecture has resulted in improvements to system availability, scalability and, resiliency, increased ROI, enhanced security, provisioning, configuration management, and improved time to market.

The most significant benefits have been improved system availability and resiliency. Upon migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there have been improvements of the bank’s hardware infrastructure, as seen by improved mean-time-to restore (MTTR), and mean-time-between-failures (MTBF).

The return on investment (ROI) was also substantial. For example, the large RISC machines were running at less than 50 percent capacity. To ensure redundancy, the bank needed to double its hardware investment to allow for fail over. “With Red Hat’s commodity model, we were able to spread the load over multiple machines and reduce our overall spend by approximately 80 percent,” said Choe. “And these savings don’t take into account the reduced maintenance costs of moving to the Red Hat platform, which is easier – and therefore cheaper – to maintain.”

Additionally, because application performance increased significantly under the new JBoss and Red Hat architecture, the bank was able to reduce the time-to-market of new products. The bank was also able to improve customer service by boosting the performance of its teller application. “The success of that project gives us confidence to tackle the rest of our browser-based Web applications with a JBoss solution,” said Choe.

The move from a vertical to a horizontal architecture and process enhancement have improved both system availability and resiliency, which allows the bank to absorb normal glitches without impacting customer transactions. “The reliability of our Web applications has improved to the point where I can go to our business partners and confidently say we have better than ‘four 9s’ availability,” said Choe.

The Red Hat/JBoss solution requires less maintenance and enables Union Bank IT to reduce their efforts on day-to-day support of legacy systems, allowing for better resource utilization. This also helped the IT group move from a reactive to a proactive model more expediently.

Additionally, the bank’s overall cost-per-transaction declined 25 to 40 percent, something that Union Bank’s business centers appreciate. “We have a charge-back system in which our departments pay for the IT resources they consume,” said Choe. “They’ve seen their charges go down month by month.”

“We benefited greatly from Red Hat consulting services as they provided valuable input and assistance in helping us migrate to Red Hat technology and dramatically improved our ability to achieve our goals,” said Choe, “With Red Hat Consulting, we felt there was an immediate knowledge transfer, and we were very satisfied with the level of involvement and quality of knowledge provided to our team.”

And ultimately many of the ongoing benefits that Choe expects to reap in coming years as a result of transforming the bank’s IT operations come from his expanded technology options. “We’ve achieved tremendous cost, reliability, and availability benefits, but in the end it all comes back to the fact that we now have choices when it comes to deploying hardware and software,” he said. “We’re no longer locked into using a particular product or vendor. Open source – and by extension, Red Hat – makes that possible.”

“The high costs and overhead associated with legacy proprietary-software and infrastructure led us to the decision to deploy Red Hat and JBoss open source solutions, and this allowed us to provide core infrastructure and development platforms at a significantly lower cost and at a faster rate,” said Choe, “Our use of Red Hat and JBoss solutions demonstrate creative business innovation through the use of horizontal architecture and the improvements allow Union Bank to continue to increase our customer experiences.”

COMPANIES: Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) and Rivet Logic

CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Publishing

GEOGRAPHY: Cambridge, Massachusetts

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: The HBP’s ability to get new products to market and the quality of the customer experience at its e-commerce site were hindered by a proprietary operating system, a difficult-to-use legacy content management system (CMS), and inflexible customer-facing Web applications, which were negatively impacting the HBP’s revenues and limiting growth

MIGRATION PATH: From a proprietary operating system running a proprietary legacy CMS application to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform running the Alfresco Content Management System

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Frameworks including JBoss Seam, JBoss Hibernate, jBPM, Oracle Database, and Alfresco’s open source Content Management System

HARDWARE: Intel™ Xeon™ processor-based Dell™ 2950 multicore servers

BENEFITS: Increased employee productivity, lowered IT operational costs, and increased Web site traffic and e-commerce transactions

Download the PDF case study

BACKGROUND
Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) is a not-for-profit, wholly-owned subsidiary of Harvard University which publishes a range of content – both print and online – bridging the knowledge gap between academic and the corporate world. It serves three primary markets: academic, enterprise, and individual managers. With more than 250 employees, the HBP’s mission is to explore and improve management practices around the world. HBP’s major Web properties include the online version of Harvard Business Review (hbr.org), Harvard Business Digital (harvardbusiness.org), and Higher Education (www.hbsp.harvard.edu). Rivet Logic and HBP were selected for the Optimized Systems Innovation Award for the use open source solutions from Red Hat, JBoss, and Alfresco that have enabled increased stability and the ability to develop products faster, bundle existing products more efficiently, and generate new revenue opportunities by increasing site traffic and offering richer, fresher, and more varied content.

Rivet Logic provides professional open source services and solutions that help organizations engage with customers, improve collaboration, and streamline operations. The company offers a full suite of JBoss professional services – including deployment, customization, and integration – enabling clients to fully leverage the power of the world’s leading open source enterprise middleware stack. With complementary expertise in the Alfresco content management platform, Rivet Logic offers integrated, content-rich, and Web-oriented architecture (WOA)-enabled solutions that power a new generation of interactive Web properties, enterprise intranet applications, and collaborative Web 2.0 communities.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
To stay innovative and develop new products faster, HBP’s business users require the ability to easily access and use content from a variety of systems across the range of HBP business units. But the existing aging content management system was limiting access to only a few trained power users, which routinely resulted in productivity bottlenecks across all units.

To further challenge the workflow and production of HBP products, critical content resided on various shared drives across the enterprise or was locked up in the proprietary system, making it increasingly difficult for HBP to repurpose existing content into the kind of new digital media products that the fast-moving business information marketplace was seeking.

“Strategically, HBP knew it needed to transform itself from a print organization – which what it was for the past 10 to 20 years – to a digital media organization,” said Mike Vertal, CEO of Rivet Logic Corporation, a professional open source services and solutions firm hired by the HBP to reengineer the core IT platform and mission-critical applications.

The growing array of aging and disparate legacy middleware and operating systems used to run HBP’s Web sites was also proving increasingly unstable. The system routinely caused integration hurdles, IT bottlenecks, and escalating operational costs due to personnel overhead and software licensing fees. The lack of easy-to-use Web publishing tools hindered the editorial staff’s ability to deliver fresh and innovative content and, consequently, limited HBP’s ability to drive site traffic and therefore the ad revenue and e-commerce transactions that contributed directly to the firm’s bottom line.

In addition to the financial overhead due to high software licensing and maintenance costs, a large percentage of IT operational costs and human resources were spent just keeping the old systems running, leaving little time and resources for developing innovative new products. The proprietary legacy systems were difficult to customize and integrate, and could not scale to keep pace with HBP’s expanding business.

SOLUTION
HBP recognized it needed to replace its proprietary content management system with a robust, yet easy-to-use enterprise-grade content management system that would facilitate access to its high-value content to its business users and integrate seamlessly with existing systems such as enterprise content repositories, search and merchandising tools, e-commerce systems, ad networks, Web analytics, and community-building applications such as blogs.

HBP required a solution that provided increased flexibility around page design and messaging, easy access to digital products, a uniform user experience, easy-to-use e-commerce experience, and improved visitor experience for user registration and session management. HBP also sought a higher level of performance, scalability, and rock-solid stability.

One absolutely non-negotiable requirement: the new solution needed to be built with open source software and an open architecture with an enterprise Java foundation at the core. It also needed to support rapid, lightweight development at the upper layers of the application stack – most notably at the user interface layer and presentation tier. This requirement would focus on HBP’s business goals and on leveraging HBP’s very high-value content and core capabilities to enable future innovation.

This is where Rivet Logic came in. Rivet Logic provides professional open source services and solutions and offers a full suite of JBoss professional services including deployment, customization, and integration – enabling clients to fully leverage the power of the world’s leading open source enterprise middleware stack.

Rivet Logic implemented an end-to-end open source solution that delivered on all of HBP’s requirements. HBP’s production ecosystem was built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon processor-based Dell 2950 servers with dual and quad core CPUs, running JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Apache, Oracle Database, and the Alfresco Content Management System.

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform was used as a core component for the dynamic content delivery system and e-commerce experience. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provided the basis for a WOA that enabled straightforward integration with numerous enterprise back-end systems and third-party Web services, including enterprise resource management (ERP), ad servers, XML repositories, taxonomy management, third-party search, Web analytics, and a user ID management system.

In addition, JBoss Seam served as the rich user interface (UI) framework for an intranet application for enterprise content management, and the public-facing Web applications for the online versions of Harvard Business Review at hbr.org, HBP’s e-commerce site at harvardbusiness.org, and HBP’s Higher Education site at www.hbsp.harvard.edu. In all cases, the JBoss Seam applications were integrated with Alfresco for back-end content management. The intranet application utilized Alfresco’s document management (DM) repository, whereas the Web site applications utilized Alfresco’s Web content management (WCM) repository.

JBoss Hibernate provided the persistence layer for all application logic and user-generated content, and jBPM governed workflow for editorial content and publishing processes. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provided the foundation necessary for HBP’s mission-critical applications that required high performance and scalability. Rivet Logic used a WOA approach for the need for single-sign-on support, while also enabling integration with a variety of systems, including a blogging platform (blogs.harvardbusiness.org), e-commerce, an XML repository (for HBR article content), and community platforms. Integration with a third-party search engine offered powerful faceted search and navigation functionalities. This content delivery approach also met standards-compliant XHTML/CSS requirements, maintained SEO-friendly URLs, and allowed for straightforward integration of Web analytics. Integration between JBoss and Alfresco was streamlined by using free and open source software from Rivet Logic, including the Remote Alfresco API rivet for Alfresco DM integration and the Crafter rivet for Alfresco.

The JBoss Seam intranet application allows enterprise users to:

- Navigate, search, find and retrieve relevant content quickly through a combination of full-text search, metadata search, and content relationship browsing

- Create and enter new content and associate metadata and relationships

- Manage digital rights of product-related media

- Restrict access to certain types of content through role-based user authorization

“The new JBoss and Alfresco based intranet provides an easy way for end-users to search and find content, as the search results deliver detailed content, such as individual chapters, images, author bios and the public-facing HBP site provides visitors a rich experience for navigating and consuming HBP’s digital content,” said Vertal, “The JBoss and Alfresco based Web content delivery system provides the dynamic and feature-rich functionalities HBP needed in a simplified manner by seamlessly connecting the presentation, application and content repository layers.”

BENEFITS
By using Red Hat, JBoss, and Alfresco open source solutions, HBP has gained platform agility that enables brand management, broader community functionality, and increased site traffic. The JBoss and Alfresco integrated solution has enabled HBP to gain the stability and ease of use it required to empower business end users and integrate with a host of critical applications and systems. With the new system in place, HBP can now develop products faster, bundle existing products more efficiently, and generate new revenue opportunities by increasing site traffic and offering richer, fresher, and more varied content.

From a developer perspective, HBP’s IT department can now focus on value-added development of new application and site features given the open source architecture and the modern WOA infrastructure. Dramatically less time and resources are now spent on maintaining rigid, legacy systems that carried expensive maintenance and software licensing costs.

The new implementation has enabled HBP to better leverage the value of its branded content, including articles, books and book chapters, blogs, podcasts, and videos – easily, quickly and securely.

“Uniting all content across the enterprise led to the rapid development of new digital media products and richer content on HBP’s revenue-generating Web properties,” said Vertal, “With Red Hat, JBoss and Alfresco, HBP has enhanced the visitor experience with improved navigation, along with much faster Web site performance. By offering fresher and more dynamic content and increasing site traffic, HBP has started to expand its revenue opportunities.”

“This project was as mission-critical as they come,” said Vertal. “It encompassed the back-end repository, the front-end application that internal users deployed to create new content and products, and a customer-facing Web application that delivered those products to customers through a variety of channels. Red Hat Enterprise Linux coupled with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform drove a total transformation of the way that HPB approached product development and delivery.”

Business agility has also increased by orders of magnitude, said Vertal. “Because we were on the new platform, in a matter of months we were able to replace the entire e-commerce front end with a much better user experience and more manageable applications.”

The stability of the system has also proven itself. And, looking forward, HBP has plans to begin incorporating social media into the site using collaborative tools and community applications that will enable its employees to become better engaged with customers. “This will allow HBP to build and maintain better customer loyalty across its entire customer base,” said Vertal.

“We utilized leading edge, open source platforms from Red Hat, Alfresco, and Rivet Logic to implement a large-scale, high-value, business-critical solution that spans internal enterprise collaboration applications, public-facing Web properties and communities, and business-critical e-commerce applications,” said Vertal, “We believe this project demonstrates the powerful benefits that commercial open source software from Red Hat, JBoss and the open source ecosystem is ready to deliver to major enterprises for the converged world of content, community, collaboration, and commerce.”
CUSTOMER ADVICE

“Any enterprise or government agency that is looking to increase employee productivity and/or improve relationships with customers should seek to leverage next-generation solutions that expand their use of content, community, collaboration, and community. And just as the consumer Web 2.0 was built on open source software, these next generation Enterprise 2.0 solutions are being built on enterprise-grade, commercial open source software from Red Hat, JBoss, Alfresco, and others. All organizations should seek to leverage commercial open source software as much as possible for any and all future enterprise software initiatives,” said Vertal.

“Businesses should remember that software is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Companies should first focus on business requirements and desired results, and leverage the best-of-breed software technologies that will help them get there. And whether the business needs better internal-facing, content-enabled enterprise applications, improved external-facing Web properties, or e-commerce platforms, JBoss software has proven it can help deliver tremendous bottom- line results,” said Vertal.

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

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: Financial Services

Geography: Slovenia

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

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

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

Hardware: HP BladeSystem

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organization increases ability to handle mission-critical educational demands utilizing JBoss Enterprise Middleware

RALEIGH, NC – April 28, 2009 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Brazilian National Institute of Educational Research and Studies (Inep), has migrated its applications to a full suite of JBoss Enterprise Middleware technology, including the JBoss Enterprise Application and Portal Platforms. Since beginning its migration to JBoss solutions, Inep has increased scalability, performance and stability for its mission-critical applications.

Inep, a Federal Institution linked to the Education Ministry of Brazil (MEC), manages the data and results from educational studies, research and evaluations related to the Brazilian Educational System. It is also responsible for the National High School Brazilian Exam (ENEM), which had over one million online registrations in 2008. After regularly encountering IT issues that required reconfiguring Inep’s system, the organization decided that the performance and scalability of its complex IT architecture must be increased to better execute daily tasks.

After evaluating a number of middleware solutions to address its performance and scalability needs, Inep selected JBoss Enterprise Middleware for its ability to meet the organization’s mission-critical demands, as well as for its affordable, reliable architecture. Inep’s solution includes JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Operations Network (JON) and JBoss Seam Framework. All of the solutions are deployed on Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology and are in compliance with the Brazilian Federal Government’s recommendation of utilizing open source solutions.

“We believe that JBoss is the best middleware architecture for enterprise use because it brings together expertise and advanced technology to meet the mission-critical demands of our systems,” said Fábio Petrillo, information systems general coordinator at Inep. “Our choice to use JBoss’ open source middleware technology has been very successful. We now have innovative technology that reduces both software and hardware costs, provides large performance gains and allows for ease of management. Just after the exam results were released at the end of 2008, thousands of people had accessed the web site, with peaks of 90,000 simultaneous accesses. Between November and December of last year alone, we had around 2,000,000 unique access hits to our systems. Red Hat support had been essential for this success”, said Petrillo.

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

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

About Inep
Inep, a Federal Institution linked to Education Ministry of Brazil (MEC), promotes statistics studies and valuations at all educational levels that help to create and deploy public policies to the educational area. In addition to Enem, Inep promotes the Certification and Competences National Exam (Encceja), Students Performance National Exam (Enade), Graduation Courses Valuation, School Census and Basic Education Valuation National System (Saeb), School Census, and University Census.

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

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

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

http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2009/inep.html

FAST FACTS

Company: EnerNOC

Industry: Energy

Geography: North America

Business Challenge: Improving the efficiency of its demand-response network that helps manage energy supply and demand

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware

Benefits: Streamlined the complex workflows involved in aligning the needs of utilities/grid operators to avoid blackouts during peak energy-consumption times and the desire of energy users to generate revenues through better managing their energy use.

“It would be very difficult for us to compete successfully without jBPM. We could not deliver our solutions nearly as efficiently and cost-effectively in this extremely aggressive market without it.”
–Ed Kusnitz, lead platform engineer, EnerNOC

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
As a leading provider of technology-enabled energy management solutions, EnerNOC is changing the way the world uses power. Through the use of advanced technologies, EnerNOC helps utilities and grid operators maintain the delicate balance between supply and demand.

EnerNOC’s demand-response solution is based upon an innovative business model. It pays the more than 4,000 business and industrial organizations in its network to reduce their electricity usage during times of high demand. This decreases stress on the electric grid, preserving the reliability of a region’s electricity resources and helping to prevent blackouts and brownouts while also alleviating the need to rely on fossil fuel-burning power plants. By acting as the middleman between energy providers and consumers, EnerNOC plays an important role in allocating what can be a scarce resource, especially when weather conditions, problems with the electrical grid, or other events create unusual demand or cause unanticipated disruptions in the flow of power.

EnerNOC is perfectly positioned for success due to three major trends: first, demand for energy is rapidly outpacing supply; secondly, due to regulatory and community concerns, it is difficult to build new regional power plants located close to energy users; and third, emerging regulatory trends on both national and local levels are changing utility business models with incentives that promote efficient energy practices.

EnerNOC is growing exponentially. At the end of 2007, EnerNOC had approximately 1,100 megawatts under management across approximately 2,200 individual sites. It ended 2008 with more than 2,000 megawatts under management across more than 4,000 sites.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
EnerNOC’s demand-response solution consists of three distinct steps: first, a customer sends out a request for additional power so as to alleviate stress on the grid or in response to high wholesale energy prices. EnerNOC takes that request and initiates actions across its network – turning out lights, turning on generators – to enable participants to follow through on their commitments to conserve power when requested. This in turn allows EnerNOC to fulfill its contracts with its customers to help reduce demand on the grid.

Prior to 2005, EnerNOC’s depended heavily on manual processes. Although certain procedures were automated, a great deal of human intervention was required to ensure that the workflow proceeded seamlessly. EnerNOC saw an opportunity to both slash operational costs, and provide greater customer service.

EnerNOC also saw an opportunity to position itself for future success. “Our strategic vision is to build highly scalable, best-of-breed technologies to support a comprehensive suite of energy management solutions and services,” said Terry Sick, vice president of product development and engineering at EnerNOC. “To accomplish this, we needed supporting technologies based upon open standards and interoperability.”

SOLUTION
Choosing the operating system was easy: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, due to its market dominance and technical leadership, was the obvious choice. And after investigating all the options for business process management (BPM) on the market, EnerNOC decided that the JBoss jBPM solution was the best choice.

JBoss jBPM is a JBoss Enterprise Framework that delivers workflow, business process management (BPM), and process orchestration in a scalable and flexible product footprint. “We were still a startup at that point, and needed a very cost-effective solution that still provided us with all the functionality we required,” said Ed Kusnitz, lead platform engineer for EnerNOC. EnerNOC also deployed JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which includes JBoss Application Server, Messaging, Clustering, Seam, Hibernate, and EJB3 along with MySQL to complete the solution.

For help with the JBoss implementation, EnerNOC selected Amentra, a leading provider of systems integration services for SOA, business process management, systems
development and enterprise data solutions. Amentra was acquired by Red Hat in March 2008.

BENEFITS
Because JBoss jBPM provides all the tools and process execution engine needed to automate complex workflows in Java and Web applications, EnerNOC was able to reduce business process errors, speed process execution, and enhance overall business performance.

Today, upon receiving an email that one of its customers requires power, the now-automated workflow process is immediately triggered. This one step alone can be extraordinary complex. “A single action initiated by an utility or grid operator can impact 300 sites on our network, and each one needs its own workflow,” said Kusnitz.

For example, some organizations want to be notified in advance before their power is curtailed; others are fine if EnerNOC just takes appropriate action. “jBPM allows us to manage the state of each site very easily, while giving us transparency into the entire operation,” said Kusnitz.

“If we had to code all this ourselves, it would be very difficult to accomplish what we need to, much less see what was occurring at any particular point in time,” agreed Andre Quina, software engineer at EnerNOC. “Under jBPM we can bring up a graphical image of the state of the workflow, which immediately shows us the state of the processes.”

jBPM has also allowed EnerNOC to achieve tremendous flexibility, reliability, and scalability. “If we need to make changes to the workflow – which happens all the time – we can do that without having to go in and actually edit the code,” said Quina. “That eliminates the risk of introducing errors, and makes for much more reliable operations.” And because EnerNOC is growing so rapidly, jBPM’s ability to manage ever-greater numbers of organizations’ power capabilities has been essential. “jBPM is enabling us to meet escalating market demand for our solutions,” said Quina.

Looking ahead, EnerNOC is currently using jBPM to create the business logic involved in curtailing and restoring sites. For example, before turning off lights, an on-site generator might need to be started, and the power load transferred to that generator. “When we get this last phase automated, we’ll be able to respond even more rapidly to a request from an ISO for more power,” said Kusnitz. “In effect, our jBPM application will be transformed into a virtual generator. We’ll be able to power it on, and provide our customers with power within just a few minutes notice.”

Amentra contributed enormously to the success of the project. “Amentra’s expertise with both JBoss jBPM and the messaging layer allowed EnerNOC engineers to focus on core business logic, which is helping us prepare for future expansion into new markets,” said Sick.

What would EnerNOC do without JBoss? “It would be very difficult for us to compete successfully without jBPM,” said Kusnitz. “”We could not deliver our solutions nearly as efficiently and cost-effectively in this extremely aggressive market without it.”

Agrees Sick: “Technical innovation has been key to EnerNOC’s growth. Open source in general – and Red Hat in particular – have been behind our success in this area.”

Companies: Advent Conferencing and CITYTECH

Industry: Conferencing/ Services/Technology

Geography: Chicago

Business Challenge: Needed to differentiate itself from the competition in a commodity marketplace.

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform Including: JBoss Seam Framework, JBoss Messaging and JBoss Cache, JBoss jBPM Framework

Benefits: Increased sales by offering a more flexible and customized service; Boosted customer satisfaction by improving provisioning and billing procedures; streamlined internal processes and cut operational costs through integrating customer relationship management, business process management, and accounting systems.

“With an award-winning organization like Red Hat behind us, and world-class technology like JBoss to leverage for our solutions, we are primed for success,” said Matt Van Bergan, chief technology officer, CITYTECH.

“CITYTECH listens to my needs, and is very creative about coming back with ideas, they speak in terms that make me confident they understand my business, and are completely focused on making Advent successful.” – Mike Swimelar, president, Advent Conferencing

See CITYTECH in the Press: Enterprise Management Quarterly

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
As a full-service telephone and Web conferencing service provider, Advent Conferencing offers the latest in secure collaboration technology for businesses of all sizes. It prides itself on being on the technological edge, and delivers the best sound quality and broadest range of features in the industry at competitive rates. Based in Chicago, Advent has a customer base that reaches throughout the United States, and has managed to differentiate itself in a crowded commodity marketplace through a savvy combination of the latest technologies and stellar customer service.

CITYTECH is a Chicago-based consultancy specializing in the design, development, and execution of highly available and scalable enterprise applications. A Red Hat partner, it specializes in JBoss, Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE), and other top software development platforms. CITYTECH’s mission is to help its customers achieve their business goals through technology. Founded in 2003, and growing at a rate of 25 percent annually, CITYTECH’s success is due to its ability to execute projects using an agile but methodical implementation methodology deployed by small, highly experienced teams of professionals. It forges long-term partnerships with clients and makes customer satisfaction its No. 1 priority.

OPPORTUNITY
The teleconferencing business is increasingly a commodity business. Most market participants offer roughly the same services at roughly the same price points. Mike Swimelar, president of Advent Conferencing, understood that the only way to differentiate his company from the pack of competitors was through technological innovation. By 2006, he was already offering the very the latest in secure collaboration technologies with the best sound quality and richest feature set. Its audio conferencing network, bridges, and processes were the most reliable in the industry. But he was looking for even more of an edge. “I realized there was more we could do,” said Swimelar.

Specifically, Swimelar wanted to provide advanced account management services to his customers that would enable them to do such things as generate usage reports on the fly; track expenses by conference leader, project, or account; and specify when, how, and in what format they would be billed. He also wanted to streamline Advent’s own internal operations. At the time, senior management, sales, marketing, operations, and accounting functions were served by “stovepipe” information systems that fragmented business and operational data in a way that made it difficult to see the big picture.

Billing – the lifeblood of any business – was especially problematic. “We were getting data dumps from the bridge software that we had to manually massage,” said Swimelar. “It could take days, sometimes longer, to get customer billing out.” In addition to slowing down cash flow, there was no flexibility in tailoring the bills according to customers’ specifications. And customers were also demanding more advanced management features that would allow them to track which employees were using the conferencing system, when, and for how long, and give them easy access to other usage and billing metrics. “Our customers wanted more control and visibility into the service, but our existing systems weren’t capable of providing that,” said Swimelar.

SOLUTION
Swimelar had worked with CITYTECH’s chief technology officer, Matt Van Bergan, while at another company. He went to Van Bergan for help developing an integrated Web-based application that would simultaneously meet Advent’s internal and customer-facing requirements. CITYTECH used the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as the basis of a development and deployment platform for building an application the two firms dubbed “Advent Pulse.”

To accomplish this, CITYTECH used the JBoss Messaging functionality within the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to provide asynchronous communication with the conferencing bridge hardware. The JBoss Seam Framework was the basis for the Web application, primarily due to its integrated AJAX functionality. JBoss jBPM was used to model and manage the human-driven business processes. Finally, the JCache support within the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform enhanced performance when communicating to the dedicated conference bridge hardware.

BENEFITS
Today, Advent Pulse provides customer relationship management (CRM), live interface with the conference bridges for billing data extraction, business intelligence, and sales commission management in one seamless application.

The benefits were immediate, and substantial. “We spend a lot less time struggling just getting data into a format for billing customers, and a lot more time on marketing and sales,” said Swimelar. Additionally, he said, Advent can provision new customers and fill orders much more swiftly and cost effectively, and provide customers with near-real-time access to usage metrics.

The net result? “Customer satisfaction is much higher, billing errors have been eliminated, and Swimelar is convinced that he’s making more sales as a direct result of the new system in place. “Because we’re able to deliver exactly what our customers need, and do it flexibly, quickly, and for a competitive rate, it has really made a difference in our revenues,” he said.

“CITYTECH listens to my needs, and is very creative about coming back with ideas. Rather than being so acronym-oriented that I don’t know what they are talking about, they speak in terms that make me confident they understand my business, and are completely focused on making me successful,” said Swimelar.

In turn, CITYTECH points back to Red Hat as the ideal technology partner. “With an award-winning organization like Red Hat behind us, and world-class technology like JBoss to leverage for our solutions, we are primed for success,” said Van Bergan. Plus, he said, the stellar enterprise support, and the direction laid out by its product roadmap have made JBoss the perfect choice of middleware for many of its clients.

Looking ahead, Advent plans to use CITYTECH’s help to keep innovating. “That’s what’s going to keep us ahead of the competition,” said Swimelar. He is currently engaged with CITYTECH’s consulting division to brainstorm how the JBoss Communications Platform – based upon the Mobicents open source project – can be used to migrate from a traditional bridge teleconferencing architecture to a more integrated solution that enables the next-generation of conferencing services. “As we get off the traditional telephone networks and more into IP [Internet Protocol], we’ll be able to implement new solutions that would allow us to integrate voice and Web conferencing even more,” said Swimelar. “We’re very excited about the possibilities.”

Experiences 500 percent increase in website capacity after implementing Red Hat and JBoss technologies

Raleigh NC – February 13, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that The Decurion Corporation, a real estate and movie exhibition corporation, has achieved success with a full suite of Red Hat solutions. Since implementing JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Global File System for Decurion’s ArcLight Cinemas website, the company has experienced enhanced support and increased performance, scalability and cost-effectiveness.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, Calif., The Decurion Corporation is parent to three primary operating businesses: Pacific Theatres Corporation, Robertson Properties Group and the ArcLight Cinema Company (ArcLight). ArcLight provides a transformational movie experience that enhances the viewers’ connection to cinema through design, amenities, service and programming. ArcLight formerly operated one theater in Hollywood with 14 auditoriums and the world-famous Cinerama Dome. The company opened a second theater in December 2007 in Sherman Oaks, CA.

Approximately 40 percent of ArcLight Cinemas ticket sales are sold through its online ticket site, ArclightCinemas.com. With a growing online customer base, ArcLight looked to fix issues with its ticket sales website, previously based on Microsoft’s .NET framework. The website had experienced issues including extensive downtime and lengthy resolution time for issues.

“When researching solutions for our ArcLight ticket website, I referenced my successful past experience with JBoss’ proven technology. There was no need to explore other technology options, because I knew JBoss would solve our issues,” said Brad Bahmanpour, Enterprise Systems Architect at Decurion. “Open source is much easier to work with in terms of licensing for the user, and it’s extremely cost-effective. JBoss Enterprise Middleware helps us accelerate solution delivery because it provides the beneficial features associated with open source solutions, combined with easy deployment and impressive customer service and support.”

Since the migration, ArcLight has experienced benefits, including ease of development on J2EE platforms and the utilization of Web Services technology. “It’s like a black and white experience between .NET and developing with JBoss,” said Bahmanpour. “We’ve had far fewer issues, and those that we have experienced have been dealt with very quickly and efficiently. JBoss technology makes development much easier and it’s very open for natural extensions like JBoss Hibernate.”

Additionally, utilizing the clustering features of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform has made the ArclightCinemas.com website scalable. ArcLight will now be able to add new nodes to its servers and enable more users and heightened traffic on its website without a change in application. Prior to implementing JBoss technology, the website could only sustain about 100 concurrent users. Now, with JBoss Clustering, it can sustain more than 600 concurrent users. For this capacity increase, ArcLight uses the same number of HP DL580G machines with only the addition of one load balancer and two application servers.

“With Linux and JBoss, we have a lot of room to grow right now. In addition to our ArclightCinemas.com website, we have utilized the JBoss, Apache and Linux platform to develop the Decurion Management company website, www.decurion.com, and also the forums.arclightcinemas.com and experience.arclightcinemas.com websites. We are planning to incorporate JBoss Operations Network, JBoss Hibernate and JBoss Seam into our solution in 2008,” said Bahmanpour.

For more information about Red Hat solutions, visit www.redhat.com and www.jboss.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: 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 the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions Risk Factors and Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

Customer: Incentive Logic

Industry: Performance-based rewards solutions

Geography: Scottsdale, Arizona

Opportunity: Transforming the infrastructure for increased scalability and agility.

Solution: The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and an interactive, hands-on workshop

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Server, JBoss Seam, JBoss Hibernate

Migration Path: Pearl-based environment to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Benefits: Faster development, greater scalability and “Ignited Performance”

“We have a very smart, fast-moving team and had set very aggressive deadlines for
taking our designs and re-factoring them in JBoss. “Instructor-led or classroom training wasn’t going to work. We needed someone who had detailed
knowledge of the entire platform, as well as of the specific applications and who could
go shoulder-to-shoulder as we tore into the code.”
- Frank Gartland, Vice President, Solution Strategy and Development, Incentive Logic.

Read Their Story

Category: Increased ROI
Winner: Alintec
Industry: Tech and Government
Geography: Milan, Italy

Overview
Alintec (www.alintec.it) (previously Politecnico Innovazione), a non-profit consortium promoting technological innovation within SMEs and public institutions and technology transfer between academia and industry in Europe, was selected following the high return on investment (ROI) it achieved after the implementation of multiple JBoss technologies within its Internet-based Library Management System (LMS) for the Province of Bergamo. The JBoss-based solution increased library loan rates by more than 25 percent and the frequency of inter-library loans by over 30 percent. Overall, it has positively impacted the end-user experience in terms of speed and ease-of-use.

Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)

Alintec is a non-profit consortium, whose aim is the promotion of technological innovation within SMEs, public institutions and the cooperation and technology transfer between University and Industry in the European dimension. We support research and technological development (RTD) activities by:

• Acting as Project Manager providing key competences in the development of innovative projects. Coordinating multidisciplinary activities and embody the only company’s referent making cooperation with University easier.
• Evaluating technological solutions and the main strategies that should be adopted.
• Identifying the company’s needs for new technology in order to develop new products, to start up new productive processes and to improve the company’s business management.
• Developing applied research projects defining how to exploit the new technology as well as its impact on the enterprise or public administration.
• Technology transfer concerning information technology and its management.
• Analysis and support for the use of innovative ICT technology to make strategic changes.
• Promoting the cooperation between University and Industry Providing responsive and professional services to find, develop, apply and improve innovative solutions for small and medium enterprises, private companies and public bodies.

Coordinated by experienced faculty members, young engineers are encouraged to take part on the projects as needed and as motivated by their specialization.

Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

The project goal was to design, develop and implement an internet based Library Management System (LMS) to integrate the 230 libraries of the Bergamo province. It was presented to us as a challenge, literally: commercial companies had tried to implement a solution to the needs of the library leading, operators, end users and public administration. They failed: the proposed solutions resulted too slow to accommodate all concurrent users, unmanageable, inflexible, buggy, crash-prone and the constant bug fixing had painfully slow resolution times and was very expensive. The original contractor preferred to back out from the support agreement; so the public administration came to university for advice, got it from our analysts team, was satisfied and so finally proposed us to build a new implementation using the technology and developing processes we had recommended them. The main challenge was quickly identified as the joined need for fast searches, changing business rules, and very high concurrency. Also, W3C WAI-AAA compliance was set as a requirement. The main business processes to support:

• Cataloguing
• Acquisitions
• Circulation
• Inter-Library Loan (ILL)
• Document reservation
• Web OPAC (Open Public Access Catalogue):
  • Public search engine
  • Open reservation
• Reporting The business numbers:
  • 230 public libraries
  • 500 operators (librarians and cataloguers)
  • 200,000 final users (citizens with library card)
  • 1.6 million loans by year (maximum 10,000 loans per day)
  • 4 million documents

What was the desired solution?

To simplify IT management and maintenance costs, they didn’t want to distribute software clients to all machines, to avoid client software management. A browser-based solution could meet this requirement, but they would prefer not to change radically the rich client user interfaces they were accustomed to: the interface should be similar to past solutions to avoid extensive training of all operators. The solution needs full web2.0 technology support, even library operators and cataloguers don’t want to install/maintain client software other than their browser. This is also a political need, with a higher usability more people will be using the system and the public bodies who endorsed the system will get credit for a good choice. In order to provide a good user experience a responsive system is a requirement: they wanted a fast system, and a lot of full text searching. They preferred to invest in fast and scalable software than to buy expensive hardware, as the Italian government endorses a software reusability program. During the analysis phase we were not sure we could provide the needed performance, so we were looking for a scalable architecture to eventually have the possibility to add hardware. We needed a flexible architecture to accommodate all requirement changes and to be able to provide the agility needed for new features and fixes, also speed and processing efficiency have always been a primary concern.

Please describe your vendor selection process and why you choose JBoss in the end.

We wanted to develop with open source components, so we began looking at JBoss, Spring and Struts. At the time, in May 2006, JBoss was providing an almost-full compliance with JSF and EJB 3.0 as JBoss RC9 was released. Seam looked very promising and innovative compared to other competitors and was backed by a team we trusted, as we already had had some experience with JBoss’s connection pool and hibernate on previous projects. As a research centre linked to University we were particularly interested in trying out bleeding edge technologies. Also JBPM and AOP were looking like the solutions to our flexibility needs, and the Seam recommended patterns found in the first examples released in those times looked very promising. We didn’t know yet whether we would need much more features such as web services and schedulers, but it was nice to know that they would be available when needed. After some preliminary testing the choice was easy.

Describe the application you built using JBoss. What role did JBoss and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

We configured the complete stack from the hardware configuration, operating system up to the java enterprise ear. We use Fedora as operating system, Apache httpd to serve some static content and finally JBoss to run the application and to serve all dynamic content. The ear contains much more technology from JBoss:

• Seam: the whole application is extensively based on Seam, we are using it as core technology from first beta releases; we use conversations, Seam JSF tags, internationalization, iText reports, email support, remoting and jboss-el capabilities.
• RichFaces: obviously, to implement web2.0 rich clients we used many RichFaces JSF components.
• Hibernate: the complete persistence layer is built on hibernate 3.2, mostly through ejb3 persistence API, sometimes using hibernate annotations. Hibernate Search is a core component; when the beta appeared on the hibernate website we immediately began testing it. Unfortunately the timing was wrong and it was still too “on-the-edge”, so we ended up using a mix of direct Lucene “low level” and Hibernate Search for other functions. We had to code direct index access to tweak the most complex queries and be able to search on structured objects, as these features are now available through Hibernate but were not at the time of release. You can take a look at the system at: http://opac.provincia.bergamo.it.

What value did you gain from implementing JBoss solutions and how did this impact your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

We began developing in October 2006 and released the final version in May 2007; now in October 2007 the customer has had some time to verify the value of the new product; we can summarize their satisfaction in the next points:

• Fast real time information sharing between all business units: some libraries are in remote mountain districts but are now served as well as in the biggest cities.
• Substantial ICT maintenance cost reduction. Better “time to user” in assistance and bug fixing (As it is a public service we wouldn’t call it “time to market”).
• Library loans increased of +25%; we believe this to be a good index to evaluate the final users satisfaction in the library system’s core mission, and a benchmark for usability.
• Inter-Library-Loans increased of +30%; This means the different libraries use available books more efficiently, reducing book-buying costs and final user’s wait queue.
• 24/7 service.

It is difficult to compare other indexes such as delivery delays to the older system as information is incomplete on the previous system, but even so the public administration and library operators agree that general efficiency has greatly improved. They are now so satisfied that they asked us to develop many more features; the JBoss technology we are using empowers us to provide the new features and functionalities at a competitive budget comparing to other solutions. Seam helped to integrate all different technologies in a clean design so that it is now easy to extend the current features: after having overcome the difficulties in using a young technology, Seam left us now in a win-win situation.

Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (I.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)

The service is made up of two dedicated servers, an application server and a database server. Backup services and network management are provided by the hosting company. Application Server: 1 HP DL360 G5 (2x Xeon 5160 with 8GB RAM) OS: Fedora Linux 6 / 64bit JBoss 4.05 (now upgrading to 4.2.2) Database Server: 1 HP DL380/1 (1x Xeon 2.8 GHz with 2GB RAM) OS: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 on Windows Server 2003 A single JBoss on a single JVM (v.6u3) is currently enough to satisfy the performance demand; It supports clustering so we are going to add a second machine to support failover, but the provided uptime is excellent even now. A custom JSF component has been built to page through search results, linked to a special type of beans to control all our different kinds of searches: implementing new query flavors became flexible, independent from the technology used to retrieve the data: by using plain Hibernate, Hibernate Search, direct Lucene, native SQL, by external web services, by remote legacy or standard library protocols. We are considering the possibility to give this code back to the community as it demonstrates very fast Hibernate queries but this will need some code polishing; a full-text query is done on average in less than 16ms, testing under high load. A custom high speed Lucene indexer was built, we’d love to give more details for this too but think it could be far too complex for a generic simple application; we are now able to index 4 Million structured documents (each being represented by a dozen of linked entities) in less than 20 minutes. During day CPU’s usage doesn’t go higher than 30%; at night some background jobs are started by quartz to build usage reports, DB cleanup, Lucene’s indexes optimization. The back office management in the library system is very extended, there are currently 15 different user roles defined to protect 330+ views, only 10 of these are public, brought to life by 760+ beans.

Did you leverage JBoss support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

During first beta releases of Seam nobody knew how to develop with it; also books were not yet available: best practices were unknown, nobody knew how to get things working. So we had to learn how to interact with the JBoss Community, asking for help, submitting bug reports, sharing the little we had learnt. This was a new experience for all of us, but revealed very interesting: we finally understood the full power of open source communities, discovering that the people that works behind these technologies were incredibly helpful and skilled. Also when no other seemed to know the answer, we got help directly from Gavin King and Pete Muir, who resolved our issues very fast. In the past we were not quite interested in the possibility to give something back to the community, now is this same possibility regarded as a very high achievement. We found almost all knowledge we needed to develop this system on jboss.org’s wiki pages, documentation or forums, or looking to examples and to the source code of libraries themselves.

Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

We will definitely use the same technologies again, both for simpler projects and for larger systems. We had some difficulties in the first months because of lack of competence, so we would recommend other companies to make use from the JBoss support services as in home training resulted very costly both in terms of time and of developer’s exhaustion; also we still would have many questions even now it is working quite well. We had to use a legacy database with very new technologies because of client’s desire; I would advice not to mix old and new and say a firm “No” to the client next time, as it is difficult to find other people with the same configuration to learn from and often these combinations are not tested as well; we are actually going to try java DB just to see how it performs, and eventually switch database technology. We would also recommend to participate in the communities both by forums and by code, as this revealed a very useful, clarifying and a fast road to solutions. Now that we have some skilled developers we are successfully using JBoss’s technologies on all starting projects.

2008 JBOSS INNOVATOR OF THE YEAR

Category: Ecosystem
Winner: Rivet Logic Corporation
Submitted by: Mike Vertal, CEO/President/Owner
Industry: Rivet = Technology Partner / Kaplan = Education
Geography: Reston, VA

Overview
Rivet Logic, a provider of professional services focused on open source solutions, and Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, a premier provider of educational and career services for individuals, schools and businesses, were selected for their use of Alfresco’s content management platform in support of the upgrade of Kaplan’s online presence from a legacy system to a JBoss-centric solution. The teams employed JBoss Seam (and Facelets), JBoss Application Server, Hibernate and jBPM to create a next-generation platform for the www.kaptest.com site that can deliver personalized applications and dynamic, targeted content. The results include a 26x performance improvement over the legacy content authoring/delivery system, much faster page load times and a “fresher” web presence for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions.

Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)

This is a joint submission by the following three companies:
Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions (KTPA) Nearly 70 years ago, Kaplan pioneered the test prep industry. Today, as a division of The Washington Post Company (NYSE:WPO), Kaplan has become the leading educational services company in the world—helping more than 3 million individuals achieve their educational and career goals through programs ranging from high school and college admissions consulting to graduate school, professional licensing, and English language training. Kaptest.com is the company’s portal to these programs. The site is divided into unique communities where customers can find programs, read articles, access special events, tools, and more—all geared towards their specific goals and interests.
Alfresco Software Ltd. Alfresco is the first and leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. It is the first company to bring the power of open source to the enterprise content management market, enabling unprecedented scale and a much lower total cost of ownership than proprietary systems.
Rivet Logic Corporation – Systems Integrator of Open Source Software; Red Hat Advanced Business Partner; Alfresco Gold Partner and North American “Partner of the Year” Rivet Logic provides professional open source services and solutions that help organizations engage with customers, improve collaboration, and streamline operations. We offers a full suite of JBoss professional services including deployment, customization, and integration — enabling clients to fully leverage the power of the world’s leading open source enterprise middleware stack. With complementary expertise in the Alfresco content management platform, Rivet Logic offers integrated content-rich and SOA-enabled solutions that power a new generation of interactive web properties, enterprise intranet applications, and collaborative Web 2.0 communities.

Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

KTPA’s primary web presence for its potential and actual customers is www.kaptest.com, which includes 10+ domains, 14,000+ unique pages, and 250,000+ contens, and a personalized experience for hundreds of thousands of students. The legacy system challenged business operations in terms of time, resources, usability, and performance.

• Time: The legacy system sometimes required a 2 week publishing cycle because of technical issues.
• Resources: The legacy system required IT involvement to support both web content authoring, and publishing content to the web content delivery system.
• Usability: The legacy system had an editorial authoring environment that was not user friendly.
• Performance: The legacy system was not performing well as traffic load increased, and scaling it out required additional high cost licenses.

What was the desired solution?

KTPA required a solution that:

1. Supported publishing on demand.
2. Required no IT involvement during content authoring, content review/ approval/workflow, and publishing to the web.
3. Supported robust enterprise architectural principles, such as clean separation of content from presentation, and web content management from web application development.
4. Had an intuitive and user-friendly authoring environment.
5. Incorporated a fast, high performance application stack and content delivery framework. Further, it should be scalable, stable, enterprise level, inexpensive and be based on Java.
6. Allowed KTPA to pay for support, not for licenses.
7. Enabled reuse of components, as supported by Seam, Facelets, and JSF.
8. Support an open source, Java based CMS (Alfresco).
9. Quality support should be available and good community background.
10. Should use open standards (not proprietary).
11. Support a designer-friendly framework for the presentation and a pluggable, middle tier framework. Templating, re-use of content, and ease of design/development were top priorities for the presentation framework.
12. And session management was a key requirement to the project. Components that can be controlled based on the scope of the session was a key technical requirement for the platform we were going to choose.

Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss in the end.

One of the primary reasons JBoss was selected over other open source frameworks/stacks was KTPA’s past experience with Red Hat/JBoss support, which in our experience was always outstanding and extremely responsive. In addition, the following attributes of the JBoss/Seam/Facelets stack were critically important:

1. Cutting edge technology, allowing us to start innovating with our web presence.
2. Very high performance.
3. Open architecture, Open source
4. Easy integration with the Alfresco web content management platform.

Furthermore, the JBoss Seam + Facelets combination helped our content delivery system framework to achieve a true, enterprise-class modern web presence and platform.

Describe the application you built using JBoss. What role did JBoss and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

The entire kaptest.com infrastructure is now running on what we call the Enteprise Content Authoring and Delivery System (ECADS), which was built by Rivet Logic and KTPA using JBoss AS, Seam, Facelets, Hibernate, jBPM, and Alfresco. ECADS is a system for authoring and publishing of web content for multiple, commonly hosted, websites. ECADS leverages the robust Alfresco XForms-based, multi-sandbox, layered versioning, content authoring system as a foundation for web content authoring (along with jBPM for workflow); and combines that with JBoss Seam’s powerful bijection, fine-grained scope management, and JSF extensions for content delivery. The content delivery framework portion of ECADS was built on JBoss Seam and EJB 3.0 with Hibernate-based JPA. The bulk of the delivery framework was built using Seam-wired POJO-based services with various scoping to accommodate the different life-cycle requirements. Lower layer services provide a foundation and an abstraction for the upper layers and is application scoped; where as higher layers that present data to the user were session scoped Seam Listeners answering directly to JSF components. The layers comprising the content delivery framework are:

1. WCM Layer: Abstracts the run-time instance of the Web Content Management System.
2. XML Layer: Handles the parsing and merging of the XML descriptors.
3. Accessor Layer: Domain specific layer that shares the context (from a terminology perspective) of the content-rich application (website).
4. Presentation Layer: Renders the final result to the user.
5. URI Transformation Layer: Transforms inbound/outbound URIs based on a pluggable transformer pipeline The presentation layer is especially interesting as it makes heavy use of Seam bijection to render the final page to the end user. And Alfresco was extended to support JBoss Seam for both preview and final publishing of websites.

What value did you gain from implementing JBoss solutions and how did this impact your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

The new kaptest.com was launched in early November 2007, and since then the value gained has been manifold:

1. Streamlined business operations and improved productivity. The KTPA editorial team has complete control over the content authoring and publishing process, with no involvement from IT required.
2. Better customer experience through much higher performance. We are seeing up to 26x performance improvement with the JBoss-based web application/content delivery system when compared to the legacy system. Specifically, current kaptest.com page load times are typically less than 1 second even under high load (which is remarkable for a dynamic web site!), whereas the legacy system took up to 13 seconds for a page load. Browse www.kaptest.com to see a high-performance JBoss/Seam application in action.
3. Improved productivity and a “fresher” web presence through on-demand web publishing: KTPA editors can now author and publish new content to the web within 8 minutes, contrasted with days and weeks with the legacy system.
4. Much higher ROI because of zero licensing costs. KTPA resources are now focused on support and development of innovation, instead of software licenses.

Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (I.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)

The production environment for kaptest.com is a multi-tier, multi-node system in a high-availability configuration. Key specifications include: Hardware nodes include: 8GB RAM 64bit CPUs Software installed includes: Red had Linux 2.6.9 EL Apache2 Mod JK JBoss AS 4.0.5 Java 5 – JRockit on 64 bit hw Facelets JSF RI 1.2 JBoss Seam 1.2.1 EJB 3(JBoss Hibernate) EHCache standard OS libraries like Apache Commons Alfreco WCM v2.0.1 Oracle 10g.

Did you leverage JBoss support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

For the most part, the JBoss stack and Seam framework were very stable. We utilized JBoss support for a handful of issues, mainly related to advanced, cutting edge features in Seam. JBoss support was very responsive, providing bug fixes and patches to resolve issues. JBoss (and Alfresco) consulting and development was provided by Rivet Logic.

Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

JBoss Seam and Alfresco WCM is a wonderful platform for enterprise-grade, high-performance, rich content delivery for next generation web sites.

Category: Emerging and Leading Edge Technologies
Winner:Big Lots
Submitted by: Big Lots Application Architecture Team
Industry: Retail
Geography: Columbus, OH

Overview
Big Lots used the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Seam to develop and implement an interactive Inventory Management System usable across a variety of devices (Point-of-Sale, mobile handheld, and back-office server) in 705 retail stores across the US (rollout to its fleet of approximately 1,350 stores will complete in 2008). The Inventory Management System is part of a multi-year store technology refresh project. Thus far, the changes have resulted in increased productivity at the front end, improved customer experience, and improved ability to respond to future business initiatives.

Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)

Big Lots is a Fortune 500 closeout retailer with over $4.5 billion in annual sales. With seven distribution centers and approximately 1,350 stores averaging nearly 30,000 sq. ft. each. The company is one of the largest specialty retailers in the country. Big Lots has been a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange for over 20 years.

Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

Big Lots is two years into a three-year project to upgrade the hardware and software infrastructure at each of its approximately 1,350 stores across the United States. The second phase, completed in 2007, consisted of development and deployment of a suite of inventory management applications used daily at each store. Our legacy electronic cash register system was very limiting from a functionality perspective. In addition, our inventory applications ran on a variety of servers, used differing technologies, and had inconsistent user interfaces, making employee training difficult. We needed a modern solution that would improve system functionality and organizational productivity, as well as enhance the customer experience.

Due to the large number of stores, our implementation also needed to be cost effective. Store bandwidth also presented a challenge, since a vast majority of our stores have very limited bandwidth to the central office. Any new solution needed to provide a great deal of store autonomy and consider the limited bandwidth constraints. Finally, we needed our inventory applications to be usable on a variety of platforms with widely varying input capabilities, everything from a traditional server PC to a touch-screen Point-of-Sale system to a small-screen, pen-based mobile scanning device.

What was the desired solution?

We needed a custom application framework solution that would allow for quick development ‘sprints,’ enabling our development team to quickly add or change functionality to the store applications as necessary to further our business needs. The application framework solution also needed to be accessible from the variety of devices in the store. The solution needed to encompass the needs of both the corporate office and the retail stores.

Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss in the end.

We recently switched our enterprise application server of choice to JBoss for development of JEE applications. We wanted to have a consistent direction for both corporate and store applications. We evaluated a variety of different platforms and settled on JBoss Enterprise Platform as the application server. Total cost of ownership and functionality were two of the key components of our decision.

The synergy between what we were looking for and the capabilities that Seam provided out of the box were a good fit, especially with its integration with RichFaces and AJAX4JSF (Java Server Faces).

Describe the application you built using JBoss. What role did JBoss and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

We run a cluster of four JBoss Enterprise Application Platform servers in the central office, and each store has a back-office server running a single instance of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform server. The servers host a variety of business applications including inventory management, centralized returns, operations dashboard etc. Integration between the server at the store and the cluster in the central office is accomplished through both REST calls as well as a custom data synchronization framework.

We use JBoss Seam-based applications to integrate inventory management functions such as Inventory Transfers, Inventory Counts, Return to Vendor, Item Inquiry, Vendor Receiving, Store Supply Ordering, Inventory Adjustments etc. An example of one of the integrated functions that JBoss Seam enables is Item Inquiry. The store cashiers can open up the Item Inquiry application on their Point of Sale system and query an item using the SKU, UPC or Item Description or on their handheld device or the back-office server. JBoss Seam enables the Item Inquiry application to integrate with the Central Office and provide an accurate count of the number of items in the store or a sister store, as well as across the district and region.

Similarly, when we conduct inventory counts, JBoss Seam is designed to enable the Inventory Counts application to be accessed on handheld devices. A store associate may scan the bar code and the system automatically computes the total number of counts per SKU based on pending transfers, incoming shipments, inventory shrinkage, sales etc. This information is then sent to the central office to report the sales per store and the items that have been moving.

JBoss Seam was used to deliver our Inventory Management applications on multiple devices and browsers, including the servers in our back office, Point-of-Sale (POS) systems, and hand-held devices with integrated bar code scanners on the retail floor. Whether our employees work with a touch screen (on the Point of Sale) or the back-office server or the handheld device, we had to make our applications deliver the same functionality regardless of the interface.

What value did you gain from implementing JBoss solutions and how did this impact your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

• When the rollout of our new POS is complete, the employees will have a highly usable suite of inventory applications that replace a variety of applications built on a myriad of technologies. This has resulted in a reduction in training time and improved productivity.
• Each store has better control over its inventory and processes, and we now have the ability to deploy robust, new inventory-related features.
• Because of the faster throughput and reliability of the platform, stores are also able to operate with fewer registers and servers.
• We were able to consolidate the technology footprint in both the central office and the stores by reducing the amount of hardware and software platforms in use.
• Because of the availability of real time inventory information, customers have a friendlier store experience.
• IT is able to spend less time maintaining application infrastructure and more time developing business logic for the applications. We have improved the construction and design process and allowed new functionality to be developed in less time than with our legacy applications.
• By using open source software the company was able to reduce the cost of deployment in the stores and central office.

Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (I.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)

So far, we have deployed the new JBoss-based system to 705 of our 1,350 stores, and we expect the deployment to be complete by the middle of next year. Each store has an IBM store-hardened server with an Intel 3 GHz CPU and 2 GB of RAM running 64-bit Windows 2003 Server. We also have IBM electronic cash registers that host an Oracle POS system from which we launch a browser for accessing the JBoss Seam-based inventory applications.

Our hand-held devices are Symbol MC3000 Mobile Computers with 64 MB of memory. They communicate with the server over a wireless network. The handheld device allows employees to access most of the inventory application functionality using a built-in bar code scanner and the numeric keypad.

At the central office, we have a cluster of four JBoss Enterprise Application Platform servers running on two physical machines. These are typical Intel-based 64-bit Windows 2003 servers.

Did you leverage JBoss support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

We have had no specific JBoss training because we haven’t felt the need for it. We did use a JBoss consultant as part of our initial contract to help us set up the initial clusters.

We have used both the official support we receive through our JBoss Premium Support subscription, as well as the less formal, but invaluable, support from the open source community.

Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

Invest in a team of quality people; spend time researching new technologies to be assured of using the right tools for the job. Develop a simple open source policy that covers both consumption and contribution. And then contribute by testing, patching, and even developing new software. When developing custom UI components, work with the toolkit providers so that you don’t duplicate efforts.

Copyright © 2007 Red Hat, Inc. All rights reserved.

Category: New Generation Technology
Winner:Lexicon Genetics
Submitted by: Buckley Kohlhauff, Mark Ma, Jason Williams
Industry: Biotechnology
Geography: The Woodlands, Texas

Overview
Selected for their use of JBoss Seam to glue together Hibernate, JSF, EJB3, and JBoss jBPM to dramatically simplify their development process and create a robust platform that can deploy mission-critical applications for the Texas Institute of Genomic Medicine.

Download JBoss Innovation Award Submission
Download JBoss World Las Vegas Presentation

1. Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)
Lexicon Genetics is focused on the discovery of breakthrough treatments for human disease. We use our proprietary gene knockout technology to systematically discover the physiological and behavioral functions of genes to identify potential drug targets. We have advanced more than 70 knockout-validated targets into drug discovery programs.
Lexicon Genetics employs over 700 people between our two sites in The Woodlands, TX and Princeton, NJ. Lexicon’s revenue for 2005 was $76M

2. Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.
The challenge was to re-engineer a legacy production system that has been running for five years. The business logic for the system was spread among various layers and components. Most of the documentation that existed was outdated. We had less than a year to redesign and implement the core architecture and workflows. In addition the new system needed to address the fundamental problems that were present in the existing system and be flexible enough to support the same goals with different business processes.

We needed to reengineer a legacy application from php/apache to an enterprise platform in order to support our major involvement in the recently established Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine (TIGM). We have implemented other projects on the JBoss platform and have been pleased with the results. JBoss is a powerful and stable application server and we feel that the JBoss Seam framework will revolutionize Java Enterprise development.

3. What was the desired solution?
Our guiding philosophy was to select a group of frameworks that prevented us from writing a lot of non-business code, but at the same time allowed us to make modifications quickly if we needed to. In addition we always want to leverage standards in the industry. We have utilized J2EE for 3 years so our solution needed to stay within that context to leverage our internal knowledge and skills.

We selected JBPM in 2005 as our solution for modeling our business processes. We selected JSF as our UI framework since the application needed to be accessed from a browser. The introduction of seam excited us because we felt that too much time was spent on connecting the backend layers in previous JSF applications we had written. We had some internal solutions that were built upon codegeneration, but they weren’t flexible and couldn’t help us with JBPM integration.

The Mouse production software encapsulates a complicated workflow covering many scientific and business processes involved in the production of genetically-modified knockout mice. It has to be flexible enough to meet the needs of a large user-base comprised of many distinctive roles. It also needs to be scalable and configurable enough to be used by other organizations involved in TIGM that may need customized workflows.

4. Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss Solutions in the end.
We already had selected JEMS as our stack for enterprise applications in 2004 after reviewing alternatives from BEA, IBM, and Oracle. That decision was based upon a matrix of feature requirements, cost, support options, references, and published data.

We also evaluated other application servers and frameworks such as Oracle JDeveloper/BPEL, JRun, and Spring. JBoss proved to be the most cost-effective and robust provider. JEMs allowed us to quickly adopt SOA-based development, increasing the reusability of our code. It enabled us to break our company’s scientific and business processes down into granular projects that fulfill specific needs and adapt to changing requirements in our fast-paced software development lifecycle.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?
JEMS is our platform for application development. The trend we see is tighter integration with the JEMS suite, therefore we lean towards selecting tools from within the suite.

6. What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)
The project is directly tied to recognizing revenue as well as providing a competitive advantage for Lexicon, TIGM, and our partners.

The Seam framework significantly reduced development and deployment time by gluing together Hibernate, JSF, EJB3, and JBPM. It enabled us to focus solely on our complicated scientific and business logic without having to put together the pieces of the enterprise framework ourselves. With the traditional Java Enterprise architecture there are so many tiers that have to be explicitly implemented, configured and glued into place. Seam makes all of that transparent to the developer.

We especially benefited from Seam’s introduction of the conversation context, as well as the integration of JBPM. The conversation context helped us resolve classic technical challenges such as users using our software in multiple windows. The JBPM framework allowed us to clearly define our business and scientific processes, and it provided a simple and efficient way of implementing the workflows, while implicitly maintaining the data integrity.

For user interface development, we have been using JSF for 2 years. Seam’s direct integration of JSF made it the perfect framework to allow us to reuse some of our existing custom JSF components that provide a rich user interface for our users.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
The project is directly tied to recognizing revenue as well as providing a competitive advantage for Lexicon, TIGM, and our partners.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
We have a clustered front-end and back-end running on Dell 2850 servers. We have 4 separate clustered instances of JBOSS spread on 3 servers. Our backend comprises of 3 servers running Oracle 9i RAC.

9. Did you leverage Red Hat support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?
We used JBoss support and training. The level of support and training is on par with what we receive from our other vendors. Early adopters clearly have an advantage to effect the direction of the product and therefore benefit from support.

10. Advice to other companies considering JEMS.
Get support and training early in the process. The learning curve isn’t steep but it can be completely avoided by doing what you would normally do with other software purchases.

Industry: Technology
Geography: Europe
Opportunity: ITo meet demanding new customer and integration partner requirements, Nuxeo decided to re-architect its flagship enterprise content management (ECM) solution. This involved migrating from the Python programming language to Java. Nuxeo needed to do this fast to minimize impact on its sales cycle, but more importantly, to be ready for a major forthcoming revision to Java: Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5.0 (Java EE 5).
Software: JBoss Application Server, JBoss Cache, JBoss jBPM, JBoss Rules, JBoss Seam
Services: JBoss Training, JBoss Certification
Benefits:

• Because JBoss played a leading role in the Java Community Process (JCP) responsible for the Java EE 5 overhaul, Nuxeo was ensured a partner that was always current with the latest Java EE 5 developments and specifications.
• By going with a Java leader and its J2EE 1.4 certified platform, Nuxeo did not need to worry about staying on top of Java developments. Instead, Nuxeo could focus fully on developing and differentiating its core business: enterprise content management.
• With JBoss expert training, combined with the simple set up for JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Nuxeo was able to quickly jump start the migration project, improving overall productivity.
• As an open source company, JBoss had an open and transparent development process that allowed Nuxeo to contribute to the evolution of JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Simply put, Nuxeo had a voice in adding new features and improvements.

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Background
Founded in 2000, Nuxeo is a leader in open source enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, which include Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (previously called Nuxeo CPS), a document and process management solution, and Nuxeo RCP, a rich client platform for building applications that can run natively on any operating system. The company supplies large corporate clients, both in France and worldwide, with global solutions to help them manage the production, publication, and storage of their documents. A team of experts provides a complete range of professional services such as consulting, development, integration, training, certification, and support. Nuxeo has headquarters in Paris, an office in Grenoble, and subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, Romania, and Senegal. Nuxeo also works with a network of integration partners such as Capgemini, Euriware, LogicaCMG/Unilog, and Sword.

Opportunity
For over six years, Nuxeo successfully marketed and sold Nuxeo CPS (Collaborative Portal Server), an open source enterprise content management (ECM) solution, to large corporations and public sector firms. Nuxeo CPS is built on the Zope web application server, which is written in Python, a popular dynamic programming language.

While the decision to build its ECM solution on Zope and Python had enabled Nuxeo to quickly get to market, by 2006 it became clear that the system had matured to a point where it needed an enterprise foundation.

“We needed to provide our integrator partners and clients with proven and supported Java technologies in order to make our applications better integrated with their IT infrastructures and to optimize their internal competences,” said Eric Barroca, executive vice president of operations, Nuxeo. Specifically, as Nuxeo CPS became increasingly critical to customers and integration partners, the more demanding their requirements. This included the proliferation of data sources and volume, e-mail, regulatory compliance, online/offline work, Web 2.0 technologies, and mobility, among others.

Nuxeo made the decision in February to re-architect its flagship product by migrating to Java, the de facto enterprise programming language for developing and running distributed multi-tier architecture applications. Barroca explained: “With its flexibility, robustness, standards, speed of development, and large, dynamic ecosystem, Java was a perfect fit for the requirements of the next-generation Nuxeo ECM solution, Nuxeo 5. The timing was critical, as Java was undergoing a major revision.”

Java Enterprise Edition 5.0 (Java EE 5) was expected to be finalized in 2007 and Nuxeo wanted to be able to take advantage of highly anticipated new features such as Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 (EJB3), Java Persistence API (JPA), and JavaServer Faces (JSF). The Java EE 5 migration project was launched, with the goal of delivering the Nuxeo 5 platform in 4Q 2006.

Now, it came down to choosing a Java application platform.

“Apart from the excellence of JBoss products, were also attracted by the maturity and quality of JBoss expert support. In fact, to develop close and reciprocal collaboration with JBoss, we became a certified JBoss technology partner.”
- Eric Barroca, Executive Vice President of Operations, Nuxeo

Solution
With the final release of Java EE 5 not expected for another year, Nuxeo wanted an application deployment platform that was compliant with the existing J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition), but cutting edge enough to have early implementations of EJB3, JSF, and other forthcoming Java EE 5 features that they could start trying out. The key criterion for Nuxeo, however, was that the Java application platform be open source, which was essential to keeping Nuxeo 5 open source as well.

There was one clear name when it comes to open source Java: JBoss.

“The JBoss Application Server was an obvious choice because it is at the core of an open source software package, of which we had already tested several modules that were indispensable for our project,” noted Barroca. Nuxeo had already begun using JBoss Enterprise Middleware products such as JBoss Cache, JBoss jBPM, JBoss Rules, and JBoss Seam in the development of its new ECM platform.

Barroca continued, “We were already testing several JBoss Enterprise Middleware components, so what could be more natural than to use JBoss Application Server, which provides excellent performance and is the market leader. Moreover, at the time we made our decision, JBoss was the only supplier with a credible offering that incorporates all Java EE 5 features.”

Nuxeo 5 uses JBoss Cache to provide the ECM platform’s distributed temporary storage for frequently accessed data; JBoss jBPM to provide business process management and workflow; JBoss Rules to enable the creation of business rules; and JBoss Seam, an innovative component programming framework, to provide a dynamic and extensible web layer that unifies Java EE 5 features like EJB3 and JSF, as well as Web 2.0 technologies like Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax). Running the business logic behind Nuxeo 5 is JBoss Application Server. The microkernel that underpins JBoss Application Server also provides Nuxeo with the flexibility to create Nuxeo Runtime, the core infrastructure of Nuxeo’s platform for creating OSGi-based extensible components.

Barroca stated, “Apart from the excellence of JBoss products, we were also attracted by the maturity and quality of JBoss expert support. In fact, to develop close and reciprocal collaboration with JBoss, we became a certified JBoss technology partner.”

After a year of successful work, Nuxeo achieved the migration of its entire technological foundation to Enterprise Java running on JBoss Enterprise Middleware with the release of Nuxeo EP 5.0 GA in February 2007.

Benefits
With its choice of JBoss, Nuxeo was also choosing a leading Java vendor. As an Executive Committee member in the Java Community Process (JCP), elected by members of the JCP, JBoss helps guide the evolution of Java technologies, including votes on specifications and new requests. As a result, JBoss was cognizant of the latest Java developments, ensuring that its JBoss Enterprise Middleware remained at the forefront. For Nuxeo, this meant they did not have to concern themselves with the latest Java issues or become Java experts. Instead, Nuxeo could concentrate on delivering and differentiating its core business: enterprise content management.

By turning its focus and resources to its core business, Nuxeo improved its ability to innovate and deliver higher value to customers through new features such as simplified integration with their information systems, high availability of critical applications, and the capacity to handle peak requirements and manage high volumes of data. The continuity of its Nuxeo 5 platform offering was now fully ensured through a new single platform that can manage all content used and produced by companies.

Nuxeo has also saw dramatic productivity gains thanks to constructive expert training from JBoss and the quick and simple set up for JBoss Enterprise Middleware. In addition, Nuxeo was able to resolve technical issues rapidly through close collaboration with JBoss’ accessible technical experts. Barroca explained, “Reducing initial training time and providing standard recognized technology like Java EE 5 for which it is easy to find skilled workers gives both our developers and customers highly competitive and measurable assets.”

Lastly, as a provider of open source solutions, Nuxeo appreciated JBoss’ open, collaborative development process, which welcomed participation and contribution from customers, partners, and individuals. This is the antithesis to commercial software where development is done behind closed doors and software arrives in a black box. Through its user experience with JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Nuxeo is able to contribute to the direction of JBoss development. Ultimately, it’s about having a voice and being heard.