One of the largest municipal electric distribution utility in Canada deploys JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform to eliminate proprietary lock-In and cut costs

FAST FACTS

Customer: Toronto Hydro Corporation

JBoss Advanced Business Partner: Int3s Corp.

Industry: Utilities: Electric Power

Geography: Toronto, Canada

Business Challenge: To build a service-oriented architecture (SOA) as the foundation for future-looking strategic initiatives designed to support enablement of smart metering and smart grid integration, reduce operational costs, promote energy conservation, and improve IT productivity

Solution:Deployed JBoss Enterprise SOA and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the platform for innovative Smart Meter program and has successfully completed the initial phases of its program to create a customer-focused cost and energy-saving initiative

Software: JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform (including JBoss ESB), Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: Leveraging Int3s expertise in SOA and Red Hat / JBoss open source Enterprise Framework, Toronto Hydro was able to successfully complete the initial phases of its groundbreaking Smart Meter program and plan other customer-focused cost- and energy-saving initiatives going forward.

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“Toronto Hydro’s technology strategy required experienced resources to supplement internal staff in delivering complex custom development projects. The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is a comprehensive toolset that comes with everything we need to build a solid SOA for facilitating easy integration of disparate systems and data. It was the perfect solution to meet our current needs – and we trust Red Hat to meet our future ones.”– Nicholas Yee, Chief Technology Officer, Int3s

BACKGROUND
Toronto Hydro is one of the largest municipal electric distribution utility in Canada and operates two wholly owned affiliates with a combined workforce of over 1,400 people. It serves 697,000 residential and commercial customers across the greater Toronto Area, representing 18.5% of electricity consumers in the province of Ontario.

Toronto Hydro’s technology strategy required experienced resources to supplement internal staff in delivering complex custom development projects and they partnered with Int3s, a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, to help implement JBoss Enterprise SOA platform, including JBoss ESB.

Int3s designs, develops, and implements IT solutions for energy and utility, financial, and telecommunications organizations. By automating key business processes, Int3s is able to cost-effectively improve the overall business performance of its clients. A Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, Int3s has two distinct practices: one dedicated to service-oriented architecture (SOA) development and implementation, and one focused on business intelligence (BI) solutions. In both of its lines of business, Int3s is committed to using open source products for strategic client initiatives.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In late 2006, the Vice President of IT & Chief Information Officer of Toronto Hydro-Electric System, Eduardo E. Bresani, called in Nicholas Yee, the Chief Technology Officer of Int3s, to help him with an ambitious new five-year strategic initiative. His goal was to implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to replace his organization’s traditional IT infrastructure.

“The new CIO was focused on modernizing the technology infrastructure, and developing a plan to build next-generation systems that would enable the firm to be more agile and efficient,” said Yee. “One of the most attractive features of an SOA is that it allows companies to build composite services in which business processes can be extended over a number of different applications. “Using an SOA to integrate a number of disparate systems was one of the primary goals of the new CIO,” said Yee.

A key business driver for the change was the firm’s availability of IT resources. “Toronto Hydro continuing issue was that system integration and support activities were using more and more resources over time,” said Yee. “The CIO wanted to free up his personnel to focus on more strategic and value-added matters.”

A key business driver for the change was the firm’s availability of IT resources. Specifically, building point-to-point interfaces between all the various systems Toronto Hydro had put into place over the years – legacy as well as client-server and Web-based systems – was proving too costly and complex. “All the custom coding was proving very expensive to develop and maintain,” said Yee.

The new SOA implementation was part of Toronto Hydro’s groundbreaking “Smart Meter” initiative. The initiative had three primary business goals: to help the firm be more customer-focused; to provide its residential and business customers with tools to do a better job of conserving energy while managing their own electricity costs; and to meet regulatory mandates to use less energy, especially during periods of peak usage.

In the case of Toronto Hydro’s Smart Meter program as mandated by the province of Ontario, the intention was to program variable pricing into the system based on the time of day that electricity was consumed (Time-Of-Use billing). The goal was to price electricity higher during peak times to encourage people and businesses to conserve energy during periods of high demand.

SOLUTION
Toronto Hydro and Int3s selected JBoss Enterprise Middleware for the Smart Meter program due to the size and stability of the technology and the toolsets that JBoss provided, including JBoss Hibernate, Rules, and jBPM Frameworks, to simplify the migration from Mule to the JBoss platform.

One of Toronto Hydro’s most important applications uses the JBoss SOA platform as a mashup framework to allow customers to view their consumption data on the Web.

“We didn’t want to be dependent on proprietary products for our SOA framework. What JBoss gives me is a solution that works with other products as long as they meet open source standards,” said Eduardo Bresani, Chief Information Officer, Toronto Hydro.

The second reason Toronto Hydro went with JBoss was the flexibility of the subscription model. “JBoss doesn’t charge for the product itself, but for the support – and we valued the enterprise level support that JBoss provides,” said Bresani.

Moving to an SOA was an essential first step in implementing Toronto Hydro’s Smart Meter initiative, as multiple diverse systems and data sets needed to be integrated to collect, process, and disseminate all the relevant customer and operational information. “Building custom APIs between each of the many systems involved simply wasn’t an option,” said Yee.

From the very beginning of the project, open source was the answer. “With open source, we could avoid vendor lock-in, and standardize everything related to business logic, business processes, and data models,” said Yee.

In a previous solution, Yee had led the team that developed the Rosetta Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which was acquired by Red Hat’s Middleware Business Unit in 2006 and incorporated into the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. After running an evaluation program with the Mule ESB, the JBoss SOA Platform was selected and implemented as part of the Early Adopter Program in early 2008.

Although Toronto Hydro is not the largest utility in North America, it currently has the largest production deployment of smart meters on the continent which stands at over 600,000. The firm is also reaffirming its leadership position by rolling out its Time-Of-Use billing initiative that will bill customers higher rates at peak times, and lower rates at off-peak times.

“From a strategic point of view, Toronto Hydro’s commitment to open source made it an imperative to look at the size and stability of the technology vendor we chose for the long-term,” said Yee. “Based on our technical evaluations, we realized it was a much better fit to align ourselves with JBoss.” In addition to other functional advantages, there were the toolsets that JBoss provided, including JBoss Hibernate, Rules, and jBPM Frameworks. “These were all powerful tools that made migration from Mule over to the JBoss platform a very straightforward process,” said Yee.

Since the initial smart meter implementation, Int3s has expanded the use of the JBoss SOA Platform at Toronto Hydro in multiple projects including the development of an ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) framework for a new Enterprise Data Warehouse and integration to Google’s PowerMeter project. The SOA Platform has also simplified large system implementations such as Oracle’s Customer Information System and the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) using SAP.

BENEFITS
The support provided by Red Hat has been superb. “As an Advanced Business Partner, we’ve had terrific access to some of the best development professionals at JBoss,” said Yee. “Not only were they very responsive when we called, but they asked us to help prioritize what functionality should be incorporated in future releases of the platform, ensuring that JBoss will continue to meet our evolving needs.”

From a global perspective, utilities have moved from focusing on simply “keeping the lights on” to better matching supply to demand.

“Ultimately, it comes down to developing new applications that can be integrated with existing systems, and consolidating the huge amounts of complex data that comes from the household as well as the utility company,” said Yee. “Although we’re still in the infancy of that effort at Toronto Hydro, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform will enable us to do that.”

“JBoss technology comes with everything we need to build a solid SOA for facilitating easy integration of disparate systems and data. It was the perfect solution to meet our current needs – and we trust Red Hat to meet our future ones,” said Yee.

Toronto Hydro is also very pleased with the relationship its firm has forged with Red Hat. Other Red Hat utilities clients can now leverage the experience Int3s gained during its work with Toronto Hydro. “It’s a win-win situation for us both,” said Yee.

“Our relationship with Red Hat has been very good, everything has always gone very smoothly. In meetings with Red Hat at the headquarters in Raleigh, Bresani discussed the innovative deployment with executives. Bresani recalls the meetings, “We discussed how we were using the products and how we could work together closely to make their products more successful. The meeting gave me confidence that we’d made the right choice of technology and vendor.”

“We’ve succeeded because of the combination of the leadership of Toronto Hydro, the innovation of the Red Hat products, and the expertise of Int3s integrating systems. Together they allowed us to leverage the power of JBoss and really make the technology work for us.

FAST FACTS

Company:Brazil Federal Supreme Tribunal’s Information and Technology Office (STF)

Industry: Government

Geography: Brazil

Business Challenge: Needed a service-oriented architecture that improved Brazil’s Federal Supreme Tribunal’s (STF) system integration process and the database and deployment governance in the STI (Technology Information of Office Secretary)

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Operations Network, JBoss SOA Platform, JBoss ESB, JBoss jBPM, JBoss Rules, and Hibernate

Hardware: x86 commodity servers with Intel Xeon-Based Processors

Benefits: Reduced costs and increased agility, functionality, and flexibility with a combination of Red Hat and JBoss solutions

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BACKGROUND
Brazil’s Federal Supreme Tribunal’s Information and Technology Office (STF) provides systems development for the Brazilian High Court’s coverage area which involves all Brazilian regional tribunals for second court appeal, which means something about 35 tribunals from all Brazil states. This includes providing new technology adoptions, computing and database net management, and software and equipment technical support and specialized assistance. All these systems supported by the Technology Office have both internal and external users who constantly demand new functionality. Among these demands is system integration, which was one of STF’s most critical functionalities.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
While STF had a functional level system and solid applications development, they were experiencing a lagging performance in regards to collaborations and information sharing. Users consistently complained about slow access and the business delays caused by shared files not appearing in real time.

In addition to low performance and a great demand for court trials, STF also experienced system integration problems. The team needed an architecture that could offer a quick and easy integration between systems, that would enable the needed components, applications, services, programs and users to easily integrate with one another to successfully share critical files, such as contracts and processes. STF demanded the system integration capabilities that could handle requests per file and setup procedures for remote calls by shared database and message lines.

SOLUTION
When considering various platform options, STF researched:

• The Federal Government guidelines for open software usage

• STI’s prior experience with Red Hat

• Evaluation of the capabilities and experience of system administrators, developers, and other IT professionals with the platform vendor’s technology

The team determined that an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) was the best solution to meet its demands and requirements in a message system with the capability to implement several open integration patterns. After researching several SOA and ESB vendors and solutions, both community projects and open source software providers, the team selected Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

JBoss Enterprise SOA provides automatic message routing and supports several information exchanging providers and channels, such as FTP, SMTP, JMS and Web Services. JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform enables business execution, responsiveness, and flexibility in a cost-effective, open platform and aggregates pluggable security, auto-discovery, localization independence, and integration patterns implementation functionalities.

Every STI/STF architecture is now developed on open source software with Java technology. For software development and support needs, STF now uses Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. STF uses (ESX 3.5) Virtual Machine, 2 Processors 3 GHz, 2 GB and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform memory.

The JBoss SOA Platform (customized by STF for services patronization) is currently in the implementation phase. STI has a subscription for Red Hat’s technical support for four CPUs in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

STI’s governance project will begin generating its services still in 2009, which STI expects to improve the aggregate value and transparency of the entire organization. 90 percent of its new projects will be based off JBoss Enterprise SOA and 100 percent of its legacy is currently in migration from JBoss.org and Fedora to JBoss Enterprise SOA. By using more efficient services, all of those who communicate with STF are expected to have benefits. For example, the lawyers win agility when they have to introduce a petition to the ministers of government. It can be done electronically, which represents a great evolution of government service.

Every STF service in production must be monitored and manageable, such capabilities are achieved using JBoss ON – JBoss Operations Network, which offers accurate information about the processing of the Services hosted in the JBoss ESB, as well as the quality and metrics delivered by the JMS technology. Based on Alerting features of JBoss ON, we can receive alerts in order to prevent any unpredictable service behavior, in addition to this, in certain cases, some default actions can be taken according the alerts, it allowed the IT team to focus exactly on real potential problems, letting JBoss ON resolve issues that can be addressed by an the enterprise SOA management solution.

For the STI team the most important benefit has been getting an infrastructure that is flexible and mature, coupled with development systems to assist the STF IT team. Also, the IT team got governance, being able to manage and measure its contribution for the Supreme Tribunal’s strategies with JBoss ON.

BENEFITS
STI reports positive experiences with Red Hat’s support as the team receives quick and informative responses. Red Hat’s support model eliminates the need for STI to staff Red Hat specialists in-house, thus cutting costs.. The STI also finds great benefit in the Red Hat Business Partner Tecnisys, which provides specialized technology consulting and support, as training and specialist technicals to assist STI needs.

STI has experienced increased agility and flexibility with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. From the commercial point of view, the cost savings are significant with the usage of open source software, and from a technology perspective, the infrastructure is more stable and failure tolerant; the service buses allow the IT team to work on more strategic work deployments, by the reuse of the available services in the service buses.

An additional, unexpected benefit from using Red Hat and JBoss is the STI developers’ attitude shift. Instead of thinking in components, developers now think in terms of aggregating services. This attitude shift contributes to increased service performance, agility, and maintenance economy.

COMPANIES: Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA) and Optaros

CATEGORY: Extensive Ecosystem

INDUSTRY: Convention center management

GEOGRAPHY: Boston, MA

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Manual processes and siloed systems resulted in inefficient workflows that caused customer service to suffer.

MIGRATION PATH: From a Microsoft™ Windows – based client-server application to service oriented architecture (SOA) J2EE application based upon the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

SOFTWARE: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise SOA, JBoss Messaging, JBoss ESB, JBoss jBPM, J2EE™, Google Web Toolkit™, Apache

HARDWARE: Intel Xeon™ – based x86 servers

BENEFITS: More efficient and timely access to data and an automated streamlined workflow that improved worker productivity and customer service levels and increased revenues. Approximately 90 percent of the MCCA’s day-to-day operations are run using open source technologies.

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BACKGROUND
The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA) owns and oversees the operation of four major facilities, including the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center (BCEC). The MCCA’s mission is to generate local economic activity by attracting conventions, tradeshows, and other events to its world-class facilities. The MCCA has generated $2.3 billion in economic impact over the past five years in the greater Boston area and is the eighth busiest convention center in North America.

Optaros is an open source consulting firm that specializes in the development of custom applications for clients through the Assembled Web. Optaros and MCCA staff worked together to rebuild the MCCA’s event management system. The product, known as ShowBiz, helps streamline the detailed process of setting up large-scale events, and is now completely run on an open source stack that was designed and assembled by Optaros. Approximately 90 percent of the MCCA’s day-to-day operations now run on open source solutions from Red Hat and JBoss.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The MCCA’s business model is based on the premise that it has an “inventory” of convention center space to sell – space that is used to host trade shows, association meetings, and other events. And despite being owned by the state government, the MCCA prides itself on operating like a for-profit business for the economic benefit of the City of Boston and Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In particular, the MCCA team strongly believes in providing an exceptional client experience, which means being able to rapidly configure its facilities and tailor its services to deliver whatever a particular customer wants.

To do this, the MCAA required an IT structure that was fluid, flexible, and scalable. But the application the MCCA was using to manage the sale of space was antiquated and difficult to use. The biggest challenge was that personnel did not have ready access to data. Without this data, users couldn’t make the kind of smart, real-time decisions needed to optimize service delivery and revenues during each stage of an event’s lifecycle. Important business decisions were being affected by the antiquated software, often relying on intuition and guesswork rather than facts. Everyone in the organization was affected by the system’s faults – from the executive suite down to contract electricians.

For example, because the financial database had been separated from the event management system in 2006, all accounts receivable and event creation information had to be manually entered in both applications, creating duplicate work for all involved as well as introducing errors into the databases. Additionally, managing service delivery to the large number of exhibitors was primarily a paper-based manual process that didn’t support online ordering and payment. And then there was scalability. The MCCA realized that its systems were a serious impediment to its ability to grow as planned.

Because of the MCCA’s unique, multi-facility business structure and complex business processes, a commercial off-the-shelf application wouldn’t do. MCCA senior executives knew they needed a new, custom-built solution that was designed to support the specific needs of their business.

Moreover, such a solution needed to provide MCCA employees with more efficient, timely access to data. It had to automate workflows. It had to minimize manual processes and eliminate redundant data entry and utilize technologies that would provide flexibility and scalability for the future needs of the business. Finally, it had to deliver an easy-to-use and elegant user experience that the MCCA could eventually extend access to the application to clients and customers.

SOLUTION
After performing a thorough analysis of its needs, the MCAA brought in Optaros, a Boston-based professional services firm that designs, assembles, supports, and monitors custom Web applications using open source software. “Steve Snyder, the CIO and CTO of the MCCA liked the freedom and the choice that open source offered,” said Errol Apostolopoulos, a management consultant at Optaros, who managed the project. “The fact that we could build him an application based on industry standards was very attractive to him. There were the lower acquisition costs, of course. But then there was also the fact that all the open source technologies, tools, and platforms integrated together so well.”

The MCCA was looking for a scalable solution that could grow with the company — exponentially in regard to data structures. They determined that a SaaS, software as a service, type architectural model, allowing for plug-and-play, iterative updates would offer technology that could evolve and grow along with the organization.

From the beginning, it was clear that Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Application Platform was going to play a large role in the solution. “Part of our process is to go out and comb the open source community to find the best technologies we can leverage to build our solutions,” said Apostolopoulos. “JBoss was the absolute best choice for the MCCA.”

The MCCA solution contained three pairs of JBoss instances. The first pair was used for the online customer-facing site. By hosting JBoss Enterprise Application Platform in a clustered environment, the MCCA allows exhibitors to purchase services and materials online. Previously, they had to fax in their orders, which then had to be entered into the old event management system manually.

The second JBoss pair also involved using JBoss in a clustered environment, and was used for the MCCA’s internal event management site. This new event management application allowed MCCA personnel to manage all aspects of the event lifecycle – from sales, to event and space setup and configuration, to exhibitor services, to all financial aspects of the event. This application uses JBoss jBPM as the workflow engine for the initiation, review, and approval of space booking throughout the sales cycle, from pre-sales through confirmation upon receipt of the signed contract.

Optaros selected Google Web Toolkit (GWT) as the front-end of the system. Business services were developed using Hibernate frameworks to handle queries and transactions.

All JBoss applications and ESB servers were configured to run on Intel Xeon-based hardware under Windows Server 2003. The applications run on a cluster of SQL Server database servers configured for replication and failover. Today, the MCCA employs 10 production servers; four servers for quality assurance (QA) and testing; and two for developing enhancements to the system to run the application.

BENEFITS
MCCA personnel now have ready access to real-time data, as opposed to running reports and requesting information that was often hidden within the old system. Streamlined processes enabled by the new architecture have allowed staff to redeploy time previously spent on unnecessary manual and paper processes to focus on customer service. Overall, employees are much more efficient, and the corporate culture is much more customer-centric than under the previous system.

This tiered architecture is not only secure, but is also scalable, reliable, and available. For instance, the deployment manager can scale the three clusters independently based on their respective usage in terms of number of concurrent users, transactions volume, and more. From a security perspective, the ESB servers act as reverse proxies to a back-office financial management system and PayPal’s credit card processing network.

The fact that Optaros designed the applications using service oriented architecture (SOA)-based plug-in/plug-out framework means that the MCCA’s own IT team can integrate other external services into it as needed going forward. This gives the MCCA the flexibility and scalability to meet its growth objectives while keeping the main application stable.

From a financial perspective, the new applications have been a tremendous success. Employees are no longer wasting time manually inputting duplicate content into multiple systems, but can focus on higher-level tasks. As a direct result of this, the MCAA has been able to collect more than $500,000 in outstanding accounts receivables over the past six months.

And the new applications have allowed the MCCA to deliver a premiere customer experience. Under the old systems, work orders were comprised of 50- to 100-page documents that included details such as the number and location of chairs, the timing of food service, electrical needs, and everything else that impacts the success of an event. Today, all data related to an event is searchable, and MCCA customers are now able to order and update space, tables, internet access, electrical outlets and other services online rather than using the outdated paper faxing process. MCCA personnel are then electronically notified when there are any changes to work orders that affect their roles in an event, and the event system can be trusted to contain the most recent information.

These conveniences are only the first step. The MCCA wants to extend accessibility and transparency to the applications even further. For example, the MCCA hopes to eventually give taxi drivers access to the system so they can see in real time the transportation needs of people attending an event.

Finally, credit card processing is now completed automatically and in real time, instead of manual batch processing at the end of each business day.

“The competence of Red Hat’s consultants and support personnel clearly contributed to the application development team’s overall success,” said Apostolopoulos. “Their support enabled the project team to deploy systems more effectively with the assurance that additional assistance was only a phone call away. The Red Hat team went above and beyond our expectations.”

Apostolopoulos said that he recommends JBoss to its customers whether they are building new applications from scratch or migrating existing applications from proprietary hardware and software to an open source platform.

“We’re finding more enterprises choosing open source – not just because of its low cost and ability to scale, but also because of the flexibility it gives them to choose components that plug and play into their systems as their needs change,” said Apostolopoulos. “And JBoss is clearly the industry middleware standard for these increasingly strategic open source projects.”

“Our customers will soon have access to the same data the staff does, so people can order more services directly through the system,” said Steve Snyder, chief information officer for the MCCA. “The shopping cart and credit card processing for basic client needs are only the first step in offering more accessibility and transparency for customers to directly access data. The MCCA has hopes of allowing more constituents to access pieces of the system. The technology and system that was built, the cooperation between the JBoss, Optaros, and MCCA teams, the full buy-in from MCCA executives to end-users, and everyone being involved in the whole process truly made this deployment a resounding success.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Red Hat

Industry: Open source software

Geography: US – Raleigh, NC

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

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Hat IT required:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAST FACTS

Company: Sensei, Inc.

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: US

Software: JBoss Enterprise Middleware platforms and frameworks including; JBoss Enterprise Application Platforms, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, and JBoss ESB, jBPM, Hibernate, Cache and RichFaces; all components of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and JBoss Enterprise Portal Platforms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Pentaho Business Intelligence, MySQL, and Alfresco.

Migration Path: Open source middleware projects from JBoss.org to JBoss Enterprise Middleware Solutions and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Benefits: Lowered infrastructure and development costs; more flexibility when deploying applications; greater scalability; enhanced standards and support.

“With a proprietary solution, trying to grow our product line would be painful, both in terms of man-hours and integrating additional software. But with the cost-effectiveness of JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we are able to reallocate resources to scale our I.T. infrastructure.”
-Tim Dion, Chief Information Officer, Sensei Inc.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
A wireless lifestyle is no excuse for leading an unhealthy life – that’s what Sensei Inc. aims to address with mobile and Web-based solutions that engage and empower consumers to live healthier, happier lives. Formed in 2005 by Humana, Inc, the company’s programs promote learning and lifestyle change through automated, personalized, interactive dialog that fits seamlessly into a consumer’s daily routine.

Sensei’s initial product, Sensei for Weight Loss, is a virtual weight and nutrition coach for users, helps them to plan grocery lists, meals and exercise routines. It also keeps consumers accountable for their actions with daily reminders about meals, weight loss and fitness goals. Providing unique real time integration between the mobile world and the online world, Sensei helps each individual, with their personalized plan, achieve success their long term lifestyle goals. The company has plans to rapidly expand its offerings to more closely align with the daily lives of consumers and to encompass more lifestyle and health issues.

Currently, Sensei’s user base numbers in the thousands, but this will increase quickly as the company introduces more consumers to their products and launches additional solutions.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Tim Dion, Sensei’s CIO and a 20-year veteran of the technology industry, was presented with a common problem among companies seeking to rapidly innovate product offerings – their current Windows-based technology platform simply was not meeting their needs.

“The design of our existing platform was very constrictive and made our initial trials and pilots extremely difficult,” said Dion. “Making changes was hard and application deployment was fragile. These difficulties opened our eyes to the fact that our underlying infrastructure itself needed a serious overhaul. A complete redesign was necessary to provide a solid foundation for current and future endeavors.”

After determining that a new platform and infrastructure were required, Sensei went through an extensive design period to break out necessary capabilities, explained Igor Royzis, Sensei’s director of technology.

“Our solutions are based on a service infrastructure with a lot of moving parts and complexity,” said Royzis. “We needed components that were flexible, scalable, cost-effective and that would enable us to design and deploy products in a timely manner.”

After examining commercial solutions, including proprietary middleware products WebLogic and WebSphere, Sensei selected an open source stack because of the high-performance and value advantages over proprietary software. Sensei chose Red Hat’s JBoss portfolio as their primary technology platform because of the wide-range of open source solutions that Sensei could deploy from a single provider, enabling cost savings and an easy migration path.

SOLUTION
Initially, Sensei tested their wellness and healthy lifestyle applications on a variety of JBoss.org products – JBoss Application Server, JBoss ESB, JBoss Portal, jBPM, Drools, Hibernate, JBoss Cache and RichFaces. Following the successful deployment of the community projects, Sensei transitioned to JBoss’ hardened and supported enterprise class open source solutions for production: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Enterprise SOA Platform and Enterprise Portal Platform running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Sensei has chosen to standardize their I.T. environment on open source solutions, allowing for increased flexibility, scalability and the ability to rapidly develop and deploy products to market. In addition to JBoss and Red Hat, the company has also deployed the Pentaho Business Intelligence Suite, an open source solution for enterprise reporting, analysis and workflow capabilities, which has integrated perfectly with Sensei’s operations, thanks to the interoperability presented by the underlying JBoss middleware solutions. Other open source solutions deployed include MySQL and Alfresco.

In addition to deploying open source solutions, Sensei is also planning to contribute some of the integration code they have written in house back into the open source community.

BENEFITS
Flexibility and scalability are the most significant benefits Sensei has realized by deploying Red Hat and JBoss solutions.

“With a proprietary solution, trying to grow our product line would be painful, both in terms of man-hours and integrating additional software,” said Dion. “But with the cost-effectiveness of JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we are able to reallocate resources to scale our I.T. infrastructure.”

By migrating from costly proprietary technology to open source solutions, Sensei has been able to carve out significant cost savings . According to Dion, the savings are “almost exponential over BEA or IBM.”

Sensei has also received a competitive edge through JBoss, thanks to Red Hat’s early adoption of various technology and privacy standards.

“Red Hat moves very quickly when it comes to supporting new standards,” continued Dion. “For our business, HIPAA and other privacy standards are becoming more and more important in not only winning new customers, but keeping those we already have. Red Hat’s agility around standards adoption helps us keep our competitive edge, and it’s one of the main reasons we put our trust in JBoss.”

For the future, Sensei is continuing to transition its JBoss community projects to JBoss Enterprise Middleware, as well as examining new JBoss solutions for deployment.

“With a proprietary solution, trying to grow our product line would be painful, both in terms of man-hours and integrating additional software,” said Dion. “But with the cost-effectiveness of JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we are able to reallocate resources to scale our I.T. infrastructure.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Educational Testing Service (ETS)

Industry: Education

Geography: International

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

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

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

Hardware: Intel x86 systems

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

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

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

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

Download the case study [PDF]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bank PHB improves flexibility, reliability and performance with Red Hat solutions

Dubai, GITEX – October 23, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Bank PHB, one of Nigeria’s top ten banks, has migrated its core mission-critical banking applications to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. Bank PHB migrated to Red Hat’s open source solutions to achieve the next step in scalability, performance and the ability to handle heavy workloads and achieve cost reduction more effectively than with other proprietary software platforms.

Bank PHB has emerged as one of Nigeria’s fastest growing banks with 1.8 million customers, making it the eighth largest bank in the country by both profitability and size. The bank has one of the most innovative financial product portfolios in the region and with its recent acquisition of Gambia’s International Bank for Commerce (IBC) it has even more plans to grow. To facilitate this growth successfully, Bank PHB required an IT solution that is based on open and flexible architecture, with higher performance and manageable total cost of ownership. It also desired a solution with no proprietary lock-in in order to allow the bank to integrate all of the different banking applications and products from its varied acquisitions.

Bank PHB, with the assistance of Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, Qrios, has migrated to a cluster of commodity hardware, including 23 IBM x86 X3850 multi-core servers. The servers are now equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, which replaced the previous IBM eServer pSeries servers that ran Unix AIX. The full solution incorporates IBM Intel servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, built using the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, including the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on the web front end to provide a highly-available client by implementing the clustering, caching and fail-over capabilities of JBoss. Bank PHB also uses Red Hat Network Satellite and JBoss Operations Network to monitor and manage updates. The new Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers all run the Temenos T24-core banking application that is built on an open architecture and uses established standards such as HTTP, XML and J2EE for a variety of banking modules including retail, private banking, treasury and Islamic banking.

“Migrating our systems to Red Hat and JBoss solutions was a strategic choice for us,” said Henry Okoede, chief technology officer at Bank PHB. “Cost saving was not the only reason we went with open source, though it was certainly icing on the cake. Our decision was driven by the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform provide constant innovation and the flexibility that enables us to develop products that we can launch to market faster, while making sure that all our systems are fully integrated and optimized to communicate with each other flawlessly. We have also felt that the service provided by Red Hat professional support was also one of the best we have ever experienced with a vendor.”

“The communication and middleware tier had to be able to support the total bank community with acceptable response times and guaranteed delivery of messages to the Temenos T24-core banking application,” said Mosh Adetoro, director at Qrios. “Bank PHB chose JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, including JBoss Messaging, a Java Message Server (JMS), to ensure delivery of the messages to the core application.”

“Bank PHB Bank is another great example of how open source provides real value for our financial services customers,” said Werner Knoblich, vice president of the EMEA region at Red Hat. “JBoss technology, combined with professional support from Red Hat, has enabled PHB Bank to deploy an enterprise-ready robust platform that meets both the performance and reliability demanded by the financial sector, with the major advantage of flexibility provided by open source.”

For more information on Red Hat, please visit www.europe.redhat.com. For more information about JBoss solutions, visit www.jboss.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com .

About Bank PHB

Bank PHB, a leading financial services institution is Nigeria’s emerging icon for banking excellence. Our strategic intent is to build a national and diversified franchise by creating superior value for all our stakeholders through unrivaled customer service experience, superior shareholder value, a conducive workplace, and commitment to corporate citizenship.

Bank PHB has emerged as one of Nigeria’s fastest growing banks with profit before tax of N10.28 billion, total assets and contingents of N480 billion as at June 2007 making it Nigeria’s eighth biggest bank in profitability and size, and seventh biggest bank in deposits. It is significant that Bank PHB since its merger in December 2005 has maintained an average growth rate that is about three times the banking industry average growth rate.
http://www.bankphb.com/live/general/index.php

About Qrios

Founded in 1998, Qrios is West Africa’s major Linux and open source service provider. As a Red Hat Advance Partner, it provides support for the most recognized open source brand in the world. Through its consulting practice, it has consistently used open source Infrastructure, Integration and Innovation to deliver measurable business value to its enterprise customers; its focus being on the major players in the financial services, telecoms and Oil and gas sectors of the region.

Leveraging on Red Hat’s professional services and a budding local team Qrios has successfully delivered projects based on almost every Red Hat solution from the operating system, database availability to SOA and middleware solutions.

Qrios is a regional Red Hat Certified Training Partner.
http://www.qrios.com/

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 60 offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s 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.

FAST FACTS

Company: Booz Allen Hamilton

Industry: Government, Management Consulting

Geography: McLean, Virginia

Challenge: Build a service oriented architecture (SOA) solution for a government client that could be leveraged and reused for other client engagements

Migration Path: Transitioned a custom coded, proprietary-based solution to a a hybrid COTS/GOTS/Open-Source application that leveraged a significant portion of the Red Hat product portfolio.

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform including JBoss jBPM and JBoss Rules, JBoss Operations Network, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Xen virtualization, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat GFS.

Operating System: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform

Hardware: Eight Dell 2950 servers with 32 gigabytes of memory

Benefits: Booz Allen built a modular SOA environment that efficiently supported the development and integration of new applications into the system, reducing the dependence on custom coding when doing proof-of-concept or production deployments of client systems across a broad range of government and commercial applications

“We selected Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware in order to meet our client’s budgetary constraints, support requirements and operational needs. The combination of efficiency provided by Xen, scalability provided by Red Hat Cluster Suite, GFS, and the clustering feature of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, along with the agility provided by the JBoss family of products has led our client to consider these products as their top-tier choice.”
– Christopher Dale, associate, Booz Allen Hamilton.

Download the Red Hat case study [PDF]

Download the JBoss case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Booz Allen Hamilton has been at the forefront of strategy and technology consulting for more than 90 years. Every day, government agencies, institutions, and infrastructure organizations rely on the firm’s expertise and objectivity, and on the combined capabilities and dedication of our exceptional people to find solutions and seize opportunities. Providing a broad range of services in strategy, operations, organization and change, information technology, systems engineering, and program management, Booz Allen is committed to delivering results that endure. With 20,000 people, Booz Allen generates approximately $4.0 billion in annual revenue.

CHALLENGE
In 2004, Booz Allen was approached by a government agency to perform a proof of concept for a proprietary-based document-processing system. Although the proof of concept was successful, attempts to scale the solution up to a production-grade system encountered serious roadblocks. “We went into it carrying a lot of ‘baggage’ due to short-cuts we’d made in the prototype system because of the lack of time and the resources we’d had during the proof of concept,” said Christopher Dale, an associate with Booz Allen Hamilton. Over the next year and a half as more users were added, the team “spent a great deal of effort trying to deal with that baggage,” Christopher said. “But the system simply couldn’t scale the way we needed it to.”

When the agency secured funding to take the system to a new level of capability, the Booz Allen team knew it had to completely rethink its options. From the start, Christopher believed that open source was the answer, and virtualization clearly needed to be part of the solution. Additionally, “we knew we needed a clustered file system, as the old way of moving data back and forth was a real bottleneck,” said Isaac Christoffersen, an associate at Booz Allen Hamilton. There also had to be a lot more flexibility for dealing with changing customer requests for additional functionality as well as scalability.

SOLUTION
After thinking through its options, Booz Allen decided to design a service oriented architecture (SOA)-based cloud platform using an enterprise service bus (ESB) for a variety of reasons. First, a highly clustered and highly virtualized architecture was needed to build the kind of agile grid of computing and storage resources necessary to scale to the extent the client agency needed. Additionally, Booz Hamilton wanted to build a platform it could leverage in the future for other client engagements.

The physical layer of the architecture was made up of the computers, storage-area networks (SANs), Ethernet networks and Fibre Channel switches. Booz Allen used commodity hardware to build this layer out. The foundation layer of the architecture created a physical “resource pool” for the system to utilize at the virtualization layer, where server, network, and storage resources could be more efficiently leveraged. Booz Allen also used Xen virtualization and the Red Hat Global File System (GFS) on top of Red Hat Cluster Suite to create an environment for transaction processing. Red Hat’s Conga Cluster Management capability, a component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, was used to control cluster and storage management.

At the application layer, JBoss Enterprise Application Server provided the ability to create a clustered application server environment. Its built-in redundancy allowed Booz Allen to implement a message-driven Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) infrastructure using the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform that included JBoss Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), JBoss jBPM and JBoss Rules. JBoss Operations Network was used to perform application and service management.

BENEFITS
The Red Hat-based implementation provided the agency with a multitude of benefits. For starters, it was able to consolidate 55 underutilized servers into just eight servers. This reduced number of systems not only handled the existing processing load, but left capacity available for even more growth in the future.

The system also helped Booz Allen design a system with tremendous flexibility and scalability. Using Red Hat solutions, Booz Allen was able to help the government agency adapt to changes in its mission and system demand in a more agile manner. Over a one-year period, data processing has increased from 1,000 documents per hour and 18,000 documents per day to more than 10,000 documents per hour and 100,000 documents per day. The number of users increased 600 percent in the first year that the system was implemented.

Believing that Booz Allen could leverage what the team had designed for other client engagements, the team briefed a group of Booz Allen partners on the idea… and they agreed. These partners agreed to fund a new initiative that is taking the SOA groundwork that the team created for the federal government, and using it to build a more general platform for application prototyping, development, and production for other government clients.

The current configuration of this platform offers database as a service, storage as a service, network as a service, and hardware as a service. The concepts in this SOA are those that industry leaders such as IBM and Amazon have been promising to deliver at some point in the future, Christopher said. “But we’re able to deliver it now.” Among other things, SOA has greatly improved our ability to integrate commercial and government off the shelf (COTS/GOTS) products. Historically, around 50% of Booz Allen’s development efforts were related to writing custom software to enable the integration of COTS and GOTS. By selecting solutions that leverage commercial and open standards, Booz Allen’s SOA approach reduces the need for this custom software and helps their clients achieve better reuse within their enterprise. Going forward, this new platform promises to be absolutely mission-critical to the way Booz Allen will provide its technology consulting services.

“We selected Red Hat and JBoss Enterprise Middleware in order to meet our client’s budgetary constraints, support requirements and operational needs,” said Christopher. “The combination of efficiency provided by Xen, scalability provided by Red Hat Cluster Suite, GFS, and the clustering feature of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, along with the agility provided by the JBoss family of products has led our client to consider these products as their top-tier choice.”

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2008 Red Hat, Inc. All rights reserved. Red Hat, the Shadowman logo and JBoss are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

www.redhat.com
5/08

Superior Alternatives

Winner: Booz Allen Hamilton

Submitted by: Christopher Dale

Vertical: Government

Geography: US

Website: www.boozallen.com

Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy and technology consulting firm with more than 18,000 employees serving government clients from more than 80 offices and has been recognized by major publications as a best place to work. Integrating the full range of consulting capabilities, Booz Allen is the one firm that helps government clients solve their toughest problems with services in strategy, operations, organization and change, and information technology. Booz Allen is committed to delivering results that endure.

Business and/or Technical Challenge

In 2004, Booz Allen Hamilton was asked by a federal government agency to develop a Microsoft Windows-based proof of concept for a document management system. The initial prototype consisted of both hardware infrastructure design and software development, but as the system’s user community grew, the newly promoted operational proof of concept quickly proved inadequate for handling the increasing volumes of data. After a budget for a “technology refresh” was approved, the Booz Allen Hamilton team decided to redesign the software architecture using JBoss Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Oracle 10G Real Application Clusters (RAC), and enterprise integration best practices. The system was transformed from a two-tier architecture to an event-driven Message-Oriented-Middleware (MOM) approach, but although the software redesign greatly improved the system’s ability to handle the increasing volumes of data, the physical infrastructure was still a bottleneck that prevented the system to scale as needed. Simply adding servers was not a viable solution because of space and energy constraints. The solution needed to be exceptionally efficient in terms of floor space, power, cooling and total cost. It also had to be easily leveraged for use in other Booz Hamilton consulting engagements.

“It wouldn’t be enough to just show that we had high server utilization,” said Christopher Dale, an associate at Booz Allen. “We had to get a ton of work out of our investment, with enough spare resources to be able to respond to new mission demands at a moments notice.” To do this, Booz Allen Hamilton needed a solution that would allow it to scale its CPU and memory resources independently of its network resources. In turn, network resources would have to scale independently of system storage capacity and throughput. “Finally, we needed to be able to dynamically allocate all available resources to the task du jour without jeopardizing the ongoing mission,” said Dale.

Vendor Selection Process

For the proof of concept, Booz Allen Hamilton needed to configure both an Oracle 9i meta data database and an Oracle 9i Text Index database. As it turned out, the federal agency client already possessed an Oracle site license. Additionally, Booz Allen Hamilton was able to “harvest” several Red Hat Enterprise Linux entitlements from a previous client project. “The icing on the cake was that I had experience installing Oracle on Red Hat Linux as a hobby,” said Dale. Once Red Hat Enterprise Linux passed security tests, it was viewed as the clear first choice for the project.

Solution

The solution consisted of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Red Hat Global File System (GFS) and Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Network Satellite and soon Red Hat Directory Server, JBoss Application Server, JBoss Enterprise Service Bus, JBoss Operations Network, and, most recently, Metamatrix. The deployed environment consist of a seven-node Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) grid (five Dell 2950s and two Dell 6850s all with maxed-out memory running Red Hat Enterprise Linux housing multiple Oracle RAC databases that performed data warehousing functions, online transaction processing (OLTP) functions and multi-language text indexing functions. There also is an eight-node (Dell 2950s with varying amounts of memory) services grid that acts as a clustered Xen host. The Xen machines on the services grid include a clustered JBoss application server, a Metamatrix node, and many other Xen machines that perform various mission-specific tasks. Both the database grid and the services grid can leverage the storage on the Fiber Channel fabric backed with multiple storage area networks (SANs).

Benefits

By implementing the new hardware and software architecture, Booz Allen Hamilton was able to transition its client from the initial proof of concept system-which had grown to a five-lab, two-building deployment that housed a single system, to an ultra-compact, highly available, high performance environment that enables three complete systems to reside in 1.5 labs. “We now have the capability to use spare capacity for the evaluation and hosting of new commercial off-the-shelf software, government off-the-shelf software, or custom software that previously would have been too expensive to implement even if the software was free,” said Dale. Additionally, using GFS to pool storage resources, Xen and Cluster Suite to pool processing and memory resources and using a bonded, link aggregated, VLANed, Xen-bridged network configuration to pool network resources, “we had successfully delivered to our client an environment that surpassed our goals in compute resource and software development agility,” he said. “In the Federal space, ROI doesn’t really have meaning, but our client was getting a lot of bang for the buck.”

Additionally, the enterprise-class system was capable of handling data volumes that commercial enterprises rarely see. “We can add new capabilities without the purchase of additional hardware, and, because we are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we leverage unlimited virtualization for Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines. Indeed, many capabilities can be made available in hours instead of weeks or months. “This is how we delivered 10 pounds of capability in a two pound bag,” said Dale.

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

One of the best value decisions Booz Allen Hamilton made was to establish a subcontract for its government client with Red Hat Global Professional Services group. “Through that subcontracting arrangement, we were able to use a full-time employee slot to bring in a number of highly skilled Red Hat, JBoss, and Metamatrix professionals who accelerated our work at critical junctures,” said Dale. Additionally, as a result of the successes the team experienced in terms of capability delivery, many team members sought out Red Hat, JBoss and Metamatrix training and certification on their own, which further benefited the client in terms of day-to-day value enhancement.

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

Be aware of all the possibilities. “Looking back to the beginning of the effort to re-engineer our legacy environment, I still cannot get my head around all that has been accomplished,” said Dale, who said that if he had been told a year ago, “This is the list of things your team needs to get done in the next year,” it would have been “soul crushing.” But now, having been through it, he is now finding it difficult not to look at any opportunity without thinking, “No problem, we have an answer for you and it isn’t going to cost you half of what you think. It’s also going to take less time, fewer people and be more capable and agile than you can imagine.”

Raleigh, NC – June 3, 2008 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Cybercity, a leading Danish broadband supplier and part of the Telenor group, has chosen to use the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform for system integration and middleware. The JBoss solution is expected to significantly reduce Cybercity’s total cost of ownership (TCO).In selecting an SOA solution, Cybercity initially evaluated Oracle Fusion, BEA WebLogic and JBoss solutions.

The organization ultimately selected the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform over an existing BEA WebLogic platform and its pre-installed COTS closed source system for the provisioning of Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) customers. In the future the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform will serve as a link between systems such as the CRM/Customer support client, backend BSS/Billing system, external partners, ISP platforms and the actual network itself. The SOA Platform will be used for point-to-point integration as well as to expose systems as reusable services. As experience with the initial deployments is obtained, further use of the platform is expected.

“The versatility of the platform allows us to use one development tool, technology and set of standards for many purposes. Also, applications deployed on the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform can be monitored and controlled in a standardized way,” said Thorbjørn Blixen-Finecke, chief architect at Cybercity. “Our aim was to create a more agile IT stack that is familiar to a larger part of the IT-development organization, ultimately resulting in a shorter time to market and easier management and monitoring.”

In addition to TCO savings, deploying the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform solution as a standard framework will also provide Cybercity with the opportunity to benefit from easier monitoring, uniform deployment and governance of integration applications and the ability to reuse services and components.

“Red Hat is a proven alternative to other proprietary middleware platforms and has a sound business model with no licensing costs, which was one of the main reasons we chose the company as our preferred supplier,” said Blixen-Finecke. “Price was certainly a differentiator, but Red Hat’s reliable products and support are prerequisites for considering open source products. As an open source product, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform also provides us with the opportunity to bring commonly used features back into the product, reducing in-house development costs.”

“Our collaboration with Cybercity fully demonstrates the benefits of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform,” said Pierre Fricke, director, Product Line Management SOA Products at Red Hat. “The flexible nature of the system gives Cybercity the opportunity to quickly develop new business applications based on existing services and scale up or down with less development effort, providing Cybercity with a more agile IT stack and a shorter time to market.”

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

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

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

Red Hat middleware platform enables development and deployment of services in service-oriented architecture, offering enhanced productivity and system reliability

Raleigh NC – February 19, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the National Institute of Design and Mint in Italy (Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, IPZS) has selected the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform to develop and implement software services in a SOA environment. With JBoss solutions, IPZS has significantly increased the productivity and reliability of its systems and has gained important business and economic advantages.

IPZS is a joint-stock company with Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finance as sole shareholder and is responsible for printing and dissemination of the Italian Official Gazette, government publications, security and anti-counterfeiting systems, fine art publishing and ID documents, including traditional and electronic ID cards, passports and smart cards.

“Migrating our systems to JBoss solutions was a strategic choice for us. It not only offers economic benefits, but also provides constant innovation and enhancements from the community that are key aspects for a company like ours that provides high-value services,” said Maurizio Quattrociocchi, IT & Telecoms Director at IPZS. “Our adoption of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, together with Red Hat support, has been extremely successful because it has enabled us to take advantage of the best of both worlds by increasing the reliability of performance levels and by optimizing our IT systems.”

“We’re excited that the IPZS has chosen JBoss’ open source solutions for its IT infrastructure,” said Gianni Anguilletti, Country Sales Manager, Red Hat Italy. “The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform provides high performance, reliability and scalability. Additionally, it offers all of the advantages of open source for those who want to implement SOA, and it complements this solution with the quality of Red Hat support.”

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

About the National Institute of Design and Mint: The Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato was founded in 1928. In 1978, under Italian law No. 154 20 July, it acquired the Italian Mint taking the name of “Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato”. In October 2002 the Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato became a joint-stock company with the Ministry of Economy and Finance as sole shareholder. The Institute (www.ipzs.it) takes care of printing and dissemination of the Italian Official Gazette and government publications; fine art publishing, security and anti-counterfeiting systems, ID documents (traditional and electronic ID cards, traditional and electronic passports, smart cards, etc), on-line data banks as well as on CD-ROM and DVDs, Internet services for Public Administrations and private bodies. All services take advantage of an advanced technology infrastructure, that is able to deliver its services seamlessly and under strict SLAs and which handles a daily average traffic of 4.4 million impressions of the free website of the Official Gazette (www.gazzettaufficiale.it). The Institute is also responsible for striking and supplying medals, badges, stamps, seals, punches and metal labels to state and private administrations; it also strikes coinage for foreign governments.

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 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: Joint JBoss/Red Hat Deployment
Winner: CompuCredit Corporation
Submitted by: Guido F. Sacchi, CIO and SVP, Corporate Strategies, Cindy Hayden, Manager of Real-Time Integration
Industry: Financial services
Geography: Atlanta, GA

Overview
Used JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to construct an XML Gateway that serves as the company’s main real-time transaction hub—enabling rapid growth, increased productivity, faster service, and millions of dollars in cost-savings.

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

CompuCredit Corporation is a leading provider of credit and related financial services and products for the underserved consumer credit market. Offering branded credit cards and other fee-based products, the company’s strategic competitive advantage lies in its ability to serve creditworthy consumers in a market segment often bypassed by traditional financial institution. For the year ended December 31, 2006, the company had over 4.3 million customer accounts with an aggregate managed portfolio of $2.81 billion in receivables.

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

In 2006, CompuCredit was facing two challenges: one business related and the other technical. From the business point of view, our traditional method of using a direct mail campaign of pre-approved credit cards to attract customers had dried up, and we needed to exploit innovative new sales channels such as Internet-based marketing and real-time telemarketing. The ITA (Invitation to Apply) sales channel had a much more significant potential for growth, but required a platform where information was instantaneously available in real-time in order to effectively turn qualified leads into real customers.

Our second challenge was the real-time interoperability of many fragmented applications that existed in our organization. The applications ranged from “Fat Client” type to web-browser based, and were written in a variety of languages such as C, Java, Python, VB, and .net. Our ultimate goal was to create a seamless experience for users and customers (at the presentation or application layer), despite the fragmentation of the application and data sources.

What was the desired solution?

We wanted to create a solution that would quickly obtain data from different areas of CompuCredit, as well as systems outside of the company, and aggregate that data into a single view for the many different business units. It needed to provide interfaces for a variety of applications, such as Real-Time Telemarketing (RTTM), credit card acquisition, on-line services, and even IVR (Interactive Voice Response). The solution also needed to have scalable, reusable components that could be used by all of the different business units at CompuCredit.

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

In the past, CompuCredit had been primarily a Solaris™ shop. We had been running Apache but had to eliminate it since it only provided pure web services. When we started with the project, we looked at the available solutions for Electronic Services Busses (ESB), but couldn’t find anything in the marketplace that met our needs at the time.

We originally became aware of the JBoss solutions by reading press reports. We had previous experience with BAE’s WebLogic™ and IBM’s WebSphere™, but getting JBoss up and running was much simpler. These proprietary (non-open source) programs took a lot of configuration to get them working the first time. JBoss worked right out of the box, although we have done some configuration over time to streamline and optimize the system. Plus, we liked the concept of having a “one stop shop” for support of both Red Hat and JBoss solutions.

The last, and possibly most important factor, was that JBoss was open source. We like open source products for their ease of use and the availability of the open-source developer community. While we have not yet had the need to modify the source code, knowing that we can if we need to tweak something is a big plus. This is especially important for innovative projects, such as the new application and frameworks that we are building.

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

The XML Gateway is a platform that uses all open-source applications with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as the core. We were able to create a system that fulfilled our vision for the seamless provisioning of real-time information. The system now masks the complexity and fragmentation of data sources and applications. The XML Gateway was developed in conjunction with a network of partners that each brought their individual expertise to the project, but CompuCredit was the driver in the project.

The CompuCredit web framework relies on the XML gateway as one of the main transaction processing engines for all of our real-time services. The solution we created is similar to a home-made ESB that is focused particularly on real-time and web services. We believe that this is a very innovative approach to solving our problems. In the future, we want to look into leveraging JBoss solutions, not just for the XML Gateway, but for a wide range of applications within the company.

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 XML Gateway was a key factor in our continued growth. In absolute terms, we have doubled the number of accounts we service in just two years.
• We have also seen tremendous business benefits. Just the improvement in productivity in handling collection and customer service calls saved us between $2 and $4 million per year, and we have seen similar benefits across the entire organization.
• Having reusable components that can be used by all of the different business units at CompuCredit saved us considerable development effort. There are services that are used by all of the different applications, including customer service, telemarketing, collections, online services, customer acquisition via Real-Time Telemarketing (RTTM).
• The time that it takes to process a transaction reduced from minutes or seconds to milliseconds, resulting in increased productivity and greater customer satisfaction.
• The project was easy to implement, taking only eight months from beginning to end and involving the efforts of only four people: one full-time developer and three contractors.

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

The XML Gateway is a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform that uses all open-source applications, such as JBoss. It consists of three hefty Dell appliances running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server, Sun JDK 1.5, and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform We use Oracle as the primary database, but with some SQL Server. Each server runs two real-time incidences of JBoss and two hot-failover instances should they be needed.

Our application is meta-data driven. We built a large-scale User Interface (UI) for testing and configuration that allowed us to exercise the web services before exposing them to the customer. Then we were able to easily modify that UI to meet the needs of the individual users.

Our platform serviced 100,000 transactions on the first day, and is currently serving 4 million transactions per day. The average transaction time is only a few hundred milliseconds, and the performance continues to improve over time as pieces are honed and hardware improved.

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

We have had several people on our team participate in JBoss training and plan to send more in the future. We are willing to make a commitment in training our own people so we can become proficient in developing and maintaining systems of this complexity. We feel that it is a good investment to have this capability in-house. We also used some of Red Hat’s consultants to help us “tune” our environment for peak performance.

We have been a support customer since 2005 and currently have a 24×7 Premium support subscription. We are pleased with our support experience. Everytime we have had to use it, the answers are good and quick.

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

We are firm believers in open source. The common myth about open source is that it is harder to get up and running. We have found that the truth is quite the opposite.

You also need to take risks and work through the initial investment, which pays off in the long run. Writing the first web service is a lot of work, but once that is done, each additional service is easy.

Selected by the community as the 2006 JBoss Innovator of the Year
Category: Service Orientated Architecture
Winner:RLPTechnologies
Submitted by: RLPTechnologies Team (see below)
Industry: Bio Engineering
Geography: Farmington Hills, Michigan

Overview
Selected for their use of JBoss AS and Hibernate as the foundation for their SOA-based platform that has revolutionized how data is collected, enhanced and compiled to increase data-file processing performance by 70%, increase scalability by 400%, and enrich the timeliness, accuracy and quality of R.L. Polk’s data for the automotive industry.

RLPTechnologies Team: Manoj Bansal, Celeste Castello, Kiran Dattani, Mike Davis, Darrin Deeter, Louis Devaney, Rick Drape, Cornell Furtuna, Bill Frost, Indira Harracksingh, Kusunam Srinivas, Joe LaFeir, Norm Marks, Sergey Melnichenko, Kris Musial, Hans Mosher, Kunnummal Naheed, Kathy Northcutt, Prabakhar Oiha, Ivan Provalov, Lawrence Rama, Mike Reed, Gary Rosteck, Clara Sagan, Scott Thibodeau, Kathy Northcutt, Vasconi, Geoff Volpe, Lisa Wagner, Pei Zheng

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

R. L. Polk & Co. is the premier provider of automotive information and marketing solutions to the automotive world and its related industries—automotive and commercial vehicle manufacturers and dealers, automotive aftermarket companies, insurance companies, finance companies, media companies, advertising agencies, consulting organizations, government agencies and market research firms.
A privately held global firm, Polk is based in Southfield, Michigan with over 1,300 employees located at operations in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

RLPTechnologies, Inc. is a wholly-owned research and development subsidiary dedicated to deploying world class data-driven technology products that support customers’ needs to turn vast amounts of data into business value with accuracy, speed and security.

RLPTechnologies specializes in building industry-leading data solutions that serve as the foundation for focused, in-depth research, analysis and action across multiple industries, enabling the effectiveness of business intelligence tools and applications that “mine” intelligence from the data.
Our company vision is nothing short of revolutionizing the way data is collected, standardized, enhanced and compiled into a Single Source of Truth. Our solution, the Enterprise Information Factory, does more than just build a consolidate view of data. It also:

• Processes data faster
• Improves data accuracy
• Ensures compliance with regulations and reporting needs
• Reduces the costs to process, support and maintain information assets

We’ve taken a unique approach to building the Enterprise Information Factory (EIF), applying the principles of lean and flexible manufacturing, along with IT industry standards including, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

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

In 2004 Polk’s CEO, President and Executive Committee held a series of strategy meetings to discuss how Polk could first maintain and then improve its competitive advantage amid significant industry, regulatory and technology change.

Over the years, Polk has enjoyed a position as the market leader and is the “gold standard” for automotive vehicle and consumer data. This data is used by every automotive brand to make critical decisions about their businesses. Further, many automotive suppliers, dealers, and other automotive-related businesses (finance and insurance, media, research, government agencies) utilize Polk solutions. Polk’s data and applications are used by its customers to help them make decisions about areas such as dealer and network planning, parts and inventory planning, customer segmentation and target marketing, and vehicle verification to name but a few. Having served the automotive market since 1922, Polk provides data that is ‘court-tested’ to defend franchise decisions made by OEMs. Further, Polk’s data is used for recall purposes to ensure that every vehicle owner is notified of recall campaigns.

Never wanting to “rest on its laurels,” Polk has continuously improved its data management methods over the years. Given today’s environment, in which privacy compliance is introducing even tighter restrictions on how data can be used, the time was right to move beyond continuous improvement to develop a innovative approach that would revolutionize Polk’s core foundational data warehouse.

Polk’s executive leadership had a healthy debate centered on two fundamental issues at the earliest stages of the re-FUEL project.

First, to be successful with a project of this significance, size and scope, the IT team members tasked with accomplishing success would need to be focused fully on this project, and not burdened with other daily demands. In other words, we didn’t want to “change the tires on the car while it was moving.”

Second, Polk realized it was not alone in facing the challenges and complexities inherent in large-scale data management, data warehousing, and application development/integration. According to Gartner, in 2004 organizations were faced with managing 30 times more data than in 1999. This trend is not likely to change.

With both issues in mind, Polk’s senior management concluded that the appropriate course of action was to develop a new subsidiary, RLPTechnologies. The charter for this organization was to develop a working software solution for use by the parent that would also be viable for other organizations.

A plan was devised to totally re-engineer the core revenue generation engine that powers the company and to do it in such a way that it:

• maintains and improves the current competitive advantage for the next 10 years, and
• creates a subsidiary company to “spin out” the technology innovations into the market place.

In December of 2004, the Polk Board of Directors approved the re-engineering program and the creation of RLPTechnologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of R.L. Polk & Co.

The re-engineering program was code-named re-FUEL ( Re-engineering Functions with Urgency, Excellence and Leadership). The re-FUEL vision was described in the charter approved by Polk’s Board of Directors as follows:

“The re-FUEL vision is nothing short of revolutionizing the way data is collected, standardized, enhanced and compiled into data warehouses. …..The solution will be designed with the awareness of today’s security threats and data privacy issues…. The solution will be designed to incorporate a high level of quality automation and statistical trending to detect, and potentially predict, data quality issues….This effort should produce a world class data collection, enhancement, and compilation solution; a system that utilizes superior technologies and methods to produce superior results and profitability. It is not an exercise in continuous improvement, but a journey of discovery and innovation”

In essence the re-FUEL team was given the rare opportunity to take a clean sheet approach to designing the new systems, processes and organization. The business vision was established, and referred to as 50/50/100:

- Lower Total Cost of Ownership

- Improve data processing and timeliness and availability

- Protect Polk’s rich heritage as the industry standard, and provide improvements in identifying problems earlier in the process

The re-FUEL team evaluated and eventually embraced a standards based, service oriented architecture (SOA) as the foundation for the new system. As a new IT architectural paradigm, SOA provides significant benefits relative to protecting legacy investments, reducing costs, and providing accelerated time to development. The team also embraced the principles of lean manufacturing – continuous material flows, standardized process, and eliminating waste – which aligned closely with the 50/50/100 goals.

Over the next 14 months, a team led by the new subsidiary (RLPTechnologies) went through an aggressive project schedule to:

The system has been built, and is being deployed in phases. The project is entering the final phase of parallel operation, which will occur from March through June, 2006. Following this phase, the Polk “data factory” will use the new solution exclusively to manage the wealth of data Polk collects.

A conversion of over 2.5 billion data records from the existing Polk data warehouse will be run through the system for consistency.

The program has delivered on both the business vision (competitive advantage & 50/50/100), and the technology vision of a true service oriented architecture (SOA) – enabling Polk to recognize significant benefits, while leveraging the new system to further strengthen its competitive advantage.

3. What was the desired solution?

The solution (The Enterprise Information Factory) was developed by RLPTechnologies as a comprehensive software application that manages how data is collected, standardized and enhanced, and compiled it into a Single Source Of Truth (SSOT) to feed use in analytical and operational applications. The Enterprise Information Factory innovates in two primary areas: business process and technology.
Business Process Innovation
We’ve learned from the principles of lean manufacturing, and applied those lessons to the area of data processing in the development of the Enterprise Information Factory (EIF). Key lean principles of continuous material flow, process automation, standardization, quality controls and continuous improvement are built into the core of the solution.

The solution handles incoming data in much the same way as a factory built on the principles of lean manufacturing handles raw materials. As soon as inbound data (the EIF’s raw material) arrives, the factory immediately recognizes the availability of data and begins processing it. This automated collection and real-time processing of Polk’s data reduces the overall time for the data to reach its key business intelligence and other transactional business systems. The Enterprise Information Factory has eliminated manual processes, allowing Polk to recognize overall improvements of up to 70 percent on processing inbound data.

This type of real-time automated processing is possible because Polk’s business analysts have the ability to setup, or “tool” the Enterprise Information Factory with custom business rules for the processing of any particular source or type of data. Once configured, the EIF runs as a fully automated system, requiring minimal manual activity. Like any highly automated system, the solution needed a robust monitoring and process control system. An operations management dashboard was built to provide visibility into the health of the factory. The operations management portal displays real-time metrics of the EIF performance. It also provides access to exception queues, allowing analysts to resolve issues that occur during automated processing. When exceptions are encountered, the specific data in question is “pulled off the line” and alerts are sent out. This allows for the continuous flow of all other data moving through the EIF, and makes Polk business analysts immediately aware of the issue, so they can begin prompt resolution. Once an exception is resolved, the data is placed back into the Enterprise Information Factory’s workflow to complete processing.

The EIF may raise exceptions for a number of reasons, but a sophisticated data quality module is the primary source. The data quality module evaluates data content at various check points in the factory, from the time data arrives through to the delivery of finished data products. The data quality tool allows Polk analysts to establish rules on such factors as data consistency, completeness and value distribution. Polk analysts can use business rules to adjust thresholds up and down for acceptable variances in the data. As a result, Polk quickly identifies data quality issues and responds to them early in the data processing lifecycle.

Through the innovative use of lean manufacturing principles in the field of data processing, the Enterprise Information Factory has allowed Polk to recognize significant business process efficiencies in a once very manual process.

Technology Innovation
The re-FUEL program was structured to allow the team to architect the Enterprise Information Factory from a clean sheet of paper, without concern for the technology constraints of existing platforms. This allowed the team to develop a very innovative technology solution. The three key areas of innovation include: the creative use of an enterprise service bus (ESB) as the solution backbone, a custom Service Orchestration engine that provides dynamic integration to web services, and the implementation of a GRID computing platform.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
The ESB serves as the JMS messaging backbone of the Enterprise Information Factory. The ESB is essentially the underlying foundation that holds together all modules of the factory, such as:

• Data Capture
• Standardization
• Data Enhancement
• Quality profiling
• Assembly

And common foundation services, such as:

• Logging
• Exception handling
• Scheduling
• Security

A standard message structure facilitates communication between components in the EIF. This approach provided a tremendous amount of flexibility when developing and integrating components of the solution to create a large composite application.

Service Orchestration Engine
The Enterprise Information Factory is founded on a service oriented architecture. At the center of that SOA is a custom developed service orchestration engine. This engine manages all business services executed against the data moving through the factory. The Service Orchestration engine was specifically designed to handle high volume and a high degree of flexibility for the handling of changes to data and business services.

The solution provides an application that allows Polk business analysts to create and modify service orchestration profiles. These profiles are based on registered services and the type of data that is being processed.

The EIF service orchestration function is based on a data driven dependencies engine (D3E). At run time the service orchestration engine retrieves a profile that defines what services have been assigned to the data source. Through the use of Web Service Description Language (WSDL) in the service registry and the inbound data schema, the engine automatically derives an optimized execution path. Unique parsing, segmenting and aggregation routines developed by RLPTechnologies allow the engine to perform parallel processing and manage calls to and from all services. All communication with registered business services use common web service standards and protocols such as SOAP, JMS, HTTPS, XML and WSDL.

The capability provided by service orchestration allows Polk to quickly integrate business services provided through either the use of commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS), legacy applications, or external providers. Polk integrated business services and used COTS such as DataFlux for name and address cleansing, and iLog for sophisticated VIN rules processing. Additionally, Polk’s legacy business logic in COBOL was wrapped with a web service interface and connected to the factory.

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

The selection of JEMS was decided very early in the project. During the early stages of the reFUEL project, the team completed a conceptual and logical architecture. Based on this target architecture several key foundation software and hardware components were identified, which included application server and object/relational persistence amongst others.

The aggressive time frame did not allow the team to do a broad sweep of available products, so the team quickly developed a short list based on market research firms such as Gartner. Based on this research the team evaluated the first round of candidate technology in a lab, to assess stability, maintainability, performance and interoperability. The results of this testing, coupled with the desire for RLPT to eventually develop a commercial product – JBoss was the clear winner.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

The JBoss Application Server and Hibernate Object/Relational Persistence products were critical components of the technical foundation for the solution.

The JBoss application server is used to run all Java components of the Enterprise Information Factory (EIF) developed using Hibernate. The core EIF Java applications used to configure the operations of the data factory include: Data Capture, Reference Data Management, Data Quality, Service Orchestration Gatekeeper and Assembly functions. These are critical business applications used by Polk Analysts to perform their day to day jobs.

The performance and scalability of the factory was paramount for this project, and was achieved using the JBoss application server. The solution needed to scale to support over 100 transactions per second while processing though several business services. The EIF Service Orchestration Engine (developed in Java), is the foundation of the SOA architecture and manages all data movement, and calls to and from all registered services. In addition to running custom developed components, JBoss application server was also used to run several of the COTS products used in the solution. This included an implementation of iLog jRules business rules execution engine running in JBoss. The business rules implementation for Polk Vehicle decoding contains well over 600,000 rules in multiple rule sets deployed across multiple application servers, one of the largest implementation of rules for a solution using iLog.

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 Polk Executive Committee approved the re-FUEL project as the #1 priority for Polk’s FY05 and FY06 business plan.

At its basis, the re-FUEL project focused on re-engineering and boosting the performance of Polk’s core revenue-generating engine, the power driving the company’s business success. Polk has realized significant business results from the re-FUEL project, including both revenue protection and generation, combined with equally significant cost-savings.

Revenue Generation
The project positively impacted Polk’s revenue picture, both in terms of protecting current revenue streams as well as supporting additional revenue growth.

Revenue Protection
Over 50 percent of Polk’s market-leading automotive data and analytical solutions are supplied by the new solution. Enhancements in the speed, accuracy, and quality of the data, combined with improved regulatory compliance capabilities, have enabled Polk to maintain a position of strength compared to its competitors. Two elements of the 50/50/100 plan—50 Percent Faster and 100 Percent Quality–are worth noting as drivers of significant business benefits for Polk.

50 Percent Faster – Tests to date show improvements of up to 70 percent in data-file processing speed (on average). For example, an average state registration file that previously would have required manual processing by as many as three full-time employees (FTE’s) and four hours of processing time, now is processed in an automated fashion in roughly 23 minutes. Further, RLPT’s approach to grid computing has allowed the solution to scale to process ~100 transactions per second, nearly four times Polk’s average of 25 transactions per second – providing headroom to accommodate, processing spikes, future transactions or business growth.

100 Percent Quality – The standardization and enhancement functionality of the Enterprise Information Factory measurably improves the accuracy and completeness of the data, preventing quality problems that might impact customer satisfaction. Automated data quality checkpoints allow for earlier recognition of problems and enable the team to resolve issues before the data is delivered to Polk’s business intelligence and operational applications. This functionality drives a focus on preventing issues–or at worst, recognizing them early–following the rule of thumb that “It costs $1 to prevent a problem, $10 to identify a problem, and $100 or more to fix it.”

Faster delivery of higher-quality information should translate into improved customer satisfaction, resulting in continued long-term business commitments. Given Polk’s subscription-based models, this will enable continued positive financial returns for the 135 year-old company. Fending off any threats to the core business will allow Polk to maximize new revenue generating opportunities and drive double-digit growth.

Revenue Generation
A significant benefit delivered by the solution for Polk is their ability to shift focus from data management to product strategy and application development. Armed with the flexible environment provided by the Enterprise Information Factory, Polk’s Product Strategy group can look for new data sources to enhance its offerings, while also developing new analytical and operational applications to leverage more timely and complete data. Polk expects these new capabilities to prime the company for future growth, and embolden managers with the knowledge that they will experience reduced time to market in future development efforts. The EIF solution will be rolled out in phases, and the team is currently working on how best to deploy it globally to further strengthen the consistency and completeness of Polk’s data and product applications worldwide.

The formation of RLPTechnologies was founded on the knowledge that the Enterprise Information Factory could also solve challenges facing other large organizations–and generate new revenue streams in the process. Market trends support this approach. A November 2005 Gartner study on data integration, for example, shows that in North America, 21% of respondent companies expect constant investment in data integration, with 60% expecting to increase such investments in 2006. Further, the same study asked respondents about the “degree to which their SOA initiatives included the service orientation of data assets and creation of data services.” Gartner concludes that “with only 37 percent indicating a strong focus on this topic, most organizations appear to be at risk for failure in their SOA efforts because they are probably not addressing fundamental issues, such as consistent transformation, delivery, and quality improvement of the data.”

With its comprehensive approach to data integration and management and with a service oriented architecture at its core, RLPTechnologies solution (the Enterprise Information Factory) is well positioned to capture continued investments by businesses in these areas.

Supported by strong partnerships with industry-leading consulting firms and software technology companies, RLPTechnologies will provide significant growth for the parent company. The three-year business projections are expected to deliver between 5 and 10 percent top-line revenue growth for Polk.

Cost-Savings
The first element of the business vision that was established in the 50/50/100 plan was 50 percent more efficient. The re-FUEL project allowed this goal to be met, with significant cost benefits to be realized by Polk in two core areas:

Leaner, Better Aligned Team
Prior to the re-FUEL project, Polk’s previously-named Data Operations team had moved from Cincinnati to Polk Headquarters in Detroit in 2003, resulting in a centralization of IT functions. The re-FUEL project transformed the structure and size of this group, creating a more cost efficient and focused unit. Renamed the Data Factory, the group is now 43 percent smaller, and team members have significantly different roles and responsibilities. The group is structured more efficiently, with roles that align directly to the functions of the solution (Data Capture, Standardization & Enhancement, Reference Data Management, Single Source of Truth/Operational Data Store, Assembly, and Operations Management). Further, the reduction in manual processes has enabled the group to focus on strategic management and analysis of data, including areas such as issue resolution and handling.

Lower IT Operating Costs
The implementation of RLPT’s grid computing model will result in significant savings for Polk. By moving away from a mainframe-based system, the grid will operate with hardware costs that are 65 percent less. This change amounts to savings of millions of dollars per year for Polk. Finally, improvements made to the open systems environment are leading to additional savings of 30 percent per year compared to prior operating budgets.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
The savings gained from the project including those from the implementation of JEMS are invested back into the business to drive product development efforts to strengthen Polk’s competitive advantage as the market leader in business intelligence for the automotive industry.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
GRID Computing Platform
The technology stack for the Enterprise Information Factory operates in a grid computing environment running Linux Redhat on Intel Xeon processors. The target production grid is comprised of 49 servers and 118 processors. The database holding the Single Source of Truth contained in a 4.5TB database with over 2.5 Billion transactions. The operation and management of the grid is accomplished through the combination of JBoss clustering, the EIF Service Orchestration and Oracle 10g GRID.

Embedded in the EIF solution is leading commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS); Oracle 10g database grid, portal and Oblix, Tibco BusinessWorks, Dataflux dfPower Studio and iLog jRules to accelerate the time to market for the solution. The EIF application that wraps all of these technologies together is a series of J2EE applications running in clustered JBoss application servers.

The grid based computing platform has allowed both significant cost savings and flexible scalability options to provide capacity on demand.

9. Did you leverage Red Hat support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

Yes, we engaged JBoss for support, training and consulting. The development team ramped up very fast and a number of outside contractors were used. To ensure proper use of Hibernate we purchased training programs for our team. Additionally, we used JBoss consulting to provide assistance with tuning activities.

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

Establish a sound SOA architecture up front and stay true to it as much as practical.

Industry: Transportation
Geography: Sweden
Opportunity: Build a new development platform to rapidly deliver integrated IT projects across the business
Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform (JBoss AS 4.2, ESB 4.2, JBoss Messaging 1.4), EnterpriseDB
Hardware: 2 IBM xSeries 346 servers
Benefits: Increased time-to-market of services for customers, increased ROI and interest in rail travel, eliminated licensing costs for the platform, integrated IT systems, and avoided vendor lock-in

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BACKGROUND
Swedish Railways (SJ AB), the national railway operator in Sweden, travels between 350 stations and carries 100,000 passengers per day. The company maintains approximately 3,500 employees and boasts a yearly revenue of 1.3 billion dollars.

OPPORTUNITY
In May 2006, SJ AB recognized the need to upgrade its internal software delivery system in order to provide a shared platform for all of its IT systems. The integration of the IT systems is essential for SJ AB as it uses a diverse range of applications relevant to human resources, sales, and other departments. Each applications needs to be accessed across a range of interfaces from PCs to PDAs. A new department called the Integration Competence Centre (ICC) was established within SJ AB with assistance from Redpill. The ICC is responsible of establishing the Integration platform and deliver service based integration solutions and new service according to SJ AB requirements.

The Integration Platform, utilizing Red Hat and JBoss solutions, was launched in October 2007. The first major project for the ICC was the creation of a ticket-auction system to sell unsold tickets on Tradera.com, the Swedish auction website owned by eBay Inc. Using JBoss ESB, any tickets which have not been sold by SJ within two days of departure are automatically transferred to the eBay-owned Tradera system, where they are available for auction until six hours before departure.

Now, with a successful Integration Platform, the ICC plans to deliver a new project every two months. The upcoming projects come from both internal and external demand and include consolidating existing systems and creating new products.

BENEFITS
With Red Hat and JBoss solutions, the SJ AB Integration Platform has delivered increased ROI for the railway. Through its Tradera.com ticket-auction project, which took just four months to complete, SJ is now able to sell an extra 1,500 tickets per week. Previously, these tickets went unsold. “We saw the return on our investment very quickly, best measured in weeks rather than in months,” said Anders Nilsson, IT-Architect at Swedish Railways.

With the creation of the SJ AB Integration Platform, the ICC is now able to rapidly deliver cost-effective, integrated IT projects across the entire business. As an indirect benefit, the collaboration with Tradera.com has also given SJ enhanced recognition an innovator in online consumer sales, attracting new interest in train travel in Sweden.