SNS Bank Selects JBoss Application Server for Transaction and Payments Processing System

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that SNS Bank, one of the top five banks in the Netherlands, is deploying front-end applications for the Bank’s transaction and payments processing system on JBoss Application Server. The transaction and payments processing system, called the SNS Administration System (SAS), provides services to over 3,300 workstations that produce over 500,000 transactions on a daily basis at the Bank’s branches across the Netherlands.

Since migrating to Application Server, SNS Bank has benefited from reduced license costs, increased stability and reliability and a reduction in hardware demands, compared with its previous system. The implementation of the Application Server was completed in only nine months. In this timeframe, the SNS IT team managed to distribute the new Java-based SAS front-end to all 3,300 workstations. Due to the high performance of the Application Server, SNS Bank is now able to run the entire system on just eight slim and economic IBM X-series servers, with enough spare capacity to support over 2,000 additional workstations.

SNS Bank was previously using a Pascal-based application, which due to technical limitations, was preventing the bank from deploying new applications. The new system uses the Application Server, a certified platform for developing and deploying enterprise Java applications, Web applications and portals that provides services including clustering, caching and persistence. In selecting a new system, the bank trialled a number of application servers and selected the JBoss solution for its superior reliability, performance and lower costs in comparison to the alternatives.

"By choosing an open source environment based on JBoss, we managed to save at least euro200,000 at the SAS front-end alone," said Marcel Schmidt, IT project manager at SNS Bank. "On top, we now run seven additional Java-based applications on JBoss. We are happy to have made such drastic savings on licenses, because in the previous situation, those costs were already rising to a couple of hundred thousand euros. These cost savings subsequently allow us to develop new initiatives without the need for extra budget."

In the future, SNS Bank is looking to deploy a full service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment and plans to use JBoss jBPM, Red Hat’s workflow framework for business process management, to extend the benefits of open source and Java. Following SNS Bank’s recent acquisition of Regiobank, it is also likely that an extra 1,000 workstations will be added to the SNS Administration System in the near future. The flexibility and scalability of the Java environment allow SNS IT to add more PCs to the current IT infrastructure without the need for any additional budget.

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

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About SNS Bank

SNS Bank is an innovative, transparent and accessible retail bank. The organization offers private customers a complete set of products with regards to mortgages, savings, investments, payments, loans and insurances. SNS Bank strives for a leading position on mortgages and products for capital development. For entrepreneurs, SNS Bank is primarily focusing on financing office buildings. With a net profit of more than euro214 million and a balance total of over euro64 billion in 2006, SNS Bank is amongst the top 5 banks in the Netherlands. SNS Bank is part of the listed company SNS REAAL.

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 three consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost 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.

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