CitiStreet and Priceline.com Boost Performance and Savings with Red Hat and JBoss Solutions

Enterprise companies achieve new levels of stability, reliability and savings by building infrastructure based on open source

RALEIGH, N.C -

Red Hat (NASDAQ: RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, today announced that CitiStreet and Priceline.com are achieving high performance and savings from the combination of Red Hat and JBoss solutions. These enterprise companies have switched to Red Hat solutions from proprietary software in order to deliver mission-critical applications and services without the concerns of performance, cost or stability-related issues.

"Priceline.com and CitiStreet are prime examples of how the open source model and the combination of Red Hat and JBoss solutions benefit the enterprise," said Tim Yeaton, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Solutions, Red Hat. "We are proud to work with these companies as a trusted partner to help them realize the value of open source and achieve big performance gains."

PRICELINE.COM

Priceline.com regularly sees millions of page views and thousands of bookings per day. As a leading Internet-based travel service provider, downtime and outages are not an option. The company shifted from proprietary server solutions to Red Hat and open source solutions in order to provide the highest-performing services and applications possible and to realize cost savings. Priceline.com also evaluated JBoss due to the company's predisposition toward developing in Java and to potentially generate further savings based on the open source model.

Today, a significant number of Priceline.com's servers run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite Server and JBoss Application Server with Tomcat and Apache web servers. Despite the millions of page views and thousands of bookings each day, the company's overall application availability runs greater than 99.97 percent and hits 100 percent for quarters at a time. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Priceline.com has realized less security patching requirements than with some proprietary application servers.

Through a series of initiatives, like the company's JBoss implementation, Priceline.com IT has been successful in proportionally reducing its relevant domestic operational IT costs for this type of infrastructure, despite increases in product complexity and product unit volumes. Forward-looking, Xen support and virtualization technologies are extremely attractive to Priceline.com. The company has been testing Xen in its development environment to reduce hardware costs and lower TCO.

"Working with Red Hat and JBoss as a single company helps lower our costs and increases our uptime by providing a complete software stack, from the operating system through the application layer. It reduces the time required for troubleshooting, configuration complexity, and contracts and vendor management," said Ron Rose, CIO, Priceline.com. "We consider Red Hat and JBoss both to have great products that we respect. Now that they are combined, we canÕt wait to benefit from their future cooperative developments."

CITISTREET

CitiStreet is one of the largest and most experienced global benefits providers. In terms of participants, the company ranks second in its business, serving over 11 million participants from corporations, government agencies, multi-employers and unions. CitiStreet's assets under administration total $200 billion.

CitiStreet faced increasing volume on its web applications, both from an expanding client base and increased utilization of the web by the plan participants they service. An earlier migration—from a C-based solution to Enterprise Java—had been successful, but now required ongoing improvement. CitiStreet needed to future-proof its web infrastructure and stay on budget.

The potential cost savings, combined with their experience with Red Hat, proved to CitiStreet that open source software was ready for prime time. The company decided to implement both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Application Server on HP ProLiant DL580 and DL360 series servers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Application Server are now corporate standards at the global benefits provider. From implementation to deployment, the quality of support, cost savings and reliability of Red Hat and JBoss have been consistent and beneficial for CitiStreet. Moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux enabled CitiStreet to also save on licensing costs. Now that all core revenue-generating applications, such as their defined contribution and health and welfare applications, are running on JBoss Application Server, CitiStreet estimated it has saved and will continue to save hundreds of thousands of dollars every year through cost-efficient hardware resource deployment.

"CitiStreet depends on Red Hat and JBoss for our operations every day," said Barry Strasnick, CIO, CitiStreet. "We have realized the value of open source for the enterprise, especially in the areas of cost savings, performance and security."

To learn more and read the full case studies on Priceline.com and CitiStreet's use of Red Hat and JBoss solutions, please visit http://www.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's 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 industry's most valued vendor for two consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor 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 applications, management, and middleware solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS). Red Hat is accelerating the shift to service-oriented architectures (SOA) and enabling the next generation of web-enabled applications running on a low-cost, secure open source platform. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide and through top-tier partnerships. Red Hat's 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.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; the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission's website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations". In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company's views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

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  • About Red Hat
  • Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As the connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.



  • Forward-Looking Statements
  • Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending; the effects of industry consolidation; the ability of the Company to compete effectively; the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; uncertainty and adverse results in litigation and related settlements; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; 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 and political conditions, governmental and public policy changes and the impact of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. 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 this press release.