| Red Hat lands big customers |
Sep. 06, 2007
Red Hat is continuing to land big, fat contracts for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux server. This week saw major deals with the French Ministry for Education and the Swedish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry.
In the first deal, the French Ministry for Education migrated 2,500 servers across its 30 local education authorities to RHEL. This decision was in line with the Ministry's strategy to invest in open-source solutions to free itself from proprietary software and vendor lock-in.
The Ministry first abandoned GECOS 7 (General Comprehensive Operating System, an obsolete mainframe operating system) and DPS 7 (an operating system for Honeywell/Bull minicomputers). Then, it gradually moved away from IBM's AIX Unix. The Ministry had decided in 2000 that it would drastically lower its costs by decoupling the operating system supplier from the hardware supplier, according to Michel Affre, the French Ministry for Education's IT systems manager.
"More than 3,000 servers, which represent 80 to 120 servers per local education authority, now operate on Linux, with 80 percent of them running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux," said Affre in a statement. "All of our applications, whether financial applications or tools for managing exams, staff, students or everyday administrative activities, are now supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Our applications suppliers, internal developers and external partners now develop on open standards to ensure compatibility with Linux and specifically with Red Hat Enterprise Linux."
By 2004, more than 95 percent of the Ministry's servers were running on Linux. "Today we are close to 100 percent, since we withdrew the last AIX servers at the end of 2006," said Affre. "Due to its professional support services, RHEL was the clear choice for our mission-critical servers, which run essential administration systems for schools all over France."
Red Hat followed up this announcement with news of another major European deal. FASS.se, the main medicines portal run by the LIF (Swedish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry), has migrated its servers from Sun Solaris to RHEL. Red Hat claims that with this move FASS.se is experiencing approximately 40 percent cost savings and has seen its new operational environment double functions on all levels.
The FASS.se Web site has approximately 4 million visitors per month, 60 percent of which are health care organizations and pharmacies. The company's medicines portal provides the opportunity for these groups to obtain current information about medicines. In addition, FASS.se is available on several different servers within health care organizations.
"Our main reason for migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux was our recognition of a need for making FASS.se's operations more efficient," said Per Manell, LIF's chief technology officer, in a statement. "During our evaluations, Red Hat Enterprise Linux became the obvious alternative because of the cost savings and increased performance delivered by the solution. It was ultimately an easy decision to select Red Hat solutions and migrate all of our servers to RHEL."
LIF is a branch organization for pharmaceutical research companies that operate in Sweden. About 60 pharmaceutical companies, representing close to 90 percent of the total pharmaceutical sales in Sweden, are members of the association. With all versions of FASS now gathered under an RHEL-based Web server, Red Hat said that members of LIF are able to update their critical pharmaceutical texts daily.
"We are excited that FASS.se has selected Red Hat solutions for its distinguished medicines portal," said Magnus Svensson, Nordic manager at Red Hat. "With pharmaceuticals and health care, it is especially important to ensure that the operation is faultless and safe."
—Steven J. Vaughan Nichols
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