UAEs leading construction company migrates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT), the worlds leading provider of open source to the enterprise, today announced that Arabtec, the leading construction company in the United Arab Emirates, has migrated its mail servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in order to provide a high quality, secure and stable core application to its 3,200 administrative and management employees.

The construction company, whose current projects include the Dubai Tower (the tallest tower in the world), The Dubai International Finance center and the Conference Palace in Abu Dhabi, has seen reduced costs, recognised at least 5x performance gain and already experienced approximately 35% TCO improvement since the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

"Our use of technology is based upon two axis: production tools such as business specific software like Autocad and email. The latter email is the backbone of our business; we rely on it for most of all communications and coordination with our clients, partners and staff therefore we cant afford any downtime", said Muttia Marwan AL Khayyat, IT manager at Arabtec.

Arabtecs previous email service was hosted and maintained by an international third party company which both increased costs and suffered poor speed reliability such that the construction company had to re-evaluate its system. Supporting the channel in the region, Opennet, Red Hats master distributor, with the help of its local channel partner eComputers, approached the construction company about the benefits of deploying an open source solution like Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Opennet MEAs mission is also to educate its channel partners such as eComputers on Red Hats offering, and to assist them in demonstrating to their clients the added value of Red Hat solutions that improves IT total cost of ownership, enhancing collaboration, scalability, security and system consolidation and on how to help companies and organisations to operate on an IT platform that enables revenue growth without incurring substantial cost.

"The Opennet team has convinced us on the reliability and efficiency of deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux. More importantly they have done a great job explaining how it would have a direct impact on reducing the total cost of ownership allowing us to be able to reinvest, save on other projects or even hire more staff," continued Mr AL Khayyat.

In addition to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployment, Arabtec also subscribes to the Red Hat Network allowing its IT department to centralise and control patch management internally rather than thousands of miles away. Mr. AL Khayyat admitted that first he was anxious what the reaction of his mainly Microsoft trained staff would be with such a move, but after an intensive Red Hat training of the IT staff by Opennet and after seeing the impressive, immediate benefits of running the first Linux project he became even more encouraged to stay on the open source route.

"Red Hat is delighted to welcome Arabtec among its customers, which highlights the growing significance of the MEA economic area for Linux adoption." said Werner Knoblich, vice president of Europe, Middle East, and Asia markets at Red Hat. "Our channel partners such as Opennet, with its proven experience in IT services, are key to our business success in delivering enterprise class open source solutions and support to customers who want to benefit from increased performance and cost savings in these emerging markets."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is running on the email server in Arabtecs head office and the DNS, proxy and firewall servers in the companys remote sites. Red Hat Enterprise Linux sits on HP Intel Xeon architecture with SCSI hard disk driver with RAID hardware.

Arabtec is currently investigating the possibility of migrating all of its file servers, backup systems as well as all its desktops to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

"I am wondering what would my IT team do if we decide to go for a full migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, if such migration happens and everything is as stable as the mail server, I think the IT staff might have to go do some construction work on site or else they will get bored...", commented Mr AL Khayyat.

For more information on Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions please visit http://www.redhat.com/en_us/USA/rhel/

About Arabtec Construction LLC

Arabtec Construction LLC. (Arabtec), a leader in the Construction Industry in the UAE, was established in the UAE in 1975. Since that time, Arabtec has undertaken a substantial program of construction, including but not limited to, High Rise Developments, Hotel Interiors, Residential Complexes, Office Blocks, Commercial and Industrial Projects, Major Airport Developments, Offshore Oil and Gas Installations and Cinemas and Entertainment Facilities.

Arabtec is fully equipped to handle all construction procedures and has the design, build, operate and management capabilities required to handle any turn key project. By providing such an efficient one-stop service, Arabtec can ensure maximum consistency between the design and build stages and offer clients many other advantages with regard to project co-ordination and scheduling.

Arabtec has played a key role in the expanding growth of the Emirates and is one of the few companies to have kept pace with the rapid development of the country. The company boasts a large multinational workforce in excess of 24,000, an array of the latest plant and equipment and a highly qualified and professional management team.

For more information on Arabtec please visit http://www.arabtecuae.com/arabtec/index.asp .

About Opennet

Opennet MEA is the Red Hat Master distributor of Red Hat Linux products and Red Hat Linux Training & Education Center for the following regions and countries: United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), Sultanate of Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt, Kingdom of Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and all African French speaking Countries.
For the past 4 years Opennet MEA has been successfully representing Red Hat Linux in North Africa and has successfully introduced Linux to government agencies and businesses and helped them take full advantage of Open Source Technologies. For more information please visit http://www.opennet.ae/index.php

About E-Computers

Based in Ajman, UAE, E-Computers was established in 2001, E-Computers is dedicated to provide a wide range of IT solutions, highly concentrated and directed toward clients support. For the past few years, E-Computers has been enriching and building up its clients base by ensuring service satisfaction and on time delivery. E-Computers works on partnering with the most known IT companies in the region, presently E-Computers promotes HP, Compaq, Toshiba, Intel and Red Hat Enterprise Linux products and solutions " Today’s customers -- and tomorrow’s -- want responsiveness, low cost and high quality. If a company does not meet or exceed the customers’ needs, their competition will". (Amr Abdul Fattah Omar, E-Computers Managing Director)

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the worlds leading open source and Linux provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with satellite offices spanning the globe. The most trusted name in open source, CIOs and other senior-level IT executives have ranked Red Hat as the industrys most valued vendor for two consecutive years in the CIO Insight MagazineVendor Value study. Red Hat is leading Linux and open source solutions into the mainstream by making high quality, low cost technology accessible. Red Hat provides operating system software along with middleware, applications and management solutions. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide and through top-tier partnerships. Red Hats open source strategy offers customers a long term plan for building infrastructures that are based on and leverage open source technologies with focus on security and ease of management. Learn more: http://www.europe.redhat.com

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