Emirates Group Standardizes On Red Hat's Solution Portfolio To Simplify And Reduce Costs

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

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

"Migrating to a new standard can be highly complex in an organisation the size of the Emirates Group/Mercator," said Patrick Naef, Divisional Senior Vice President, Emirates Group IT and head of Mercator said. "Change management and confidence in vendor support are critical factors to successfully adopt a new standard- this is why we chose Red Hat." The Emirates Group IT/Mercator supports a global enterprise of approximately 40,000 employees as well as more than 100 customers outside of the Emirates Group under the brand name Mercator. Consequently it has a complex IT infrastructure made up of a variety of software and hardware technologies. The Emirates Group IT / Mercator strategy to migrate to JBoss was to first divert new applications for deployment on this platform. This allowed Emirates Group IT to quickly build capability, before applications were promoted to the production environment. The migration occurred seamlessly with Red Hat providing training and support to the Emirates Group IT department to ensure a more gradual adoption process.(C) 2009 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)

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