November 16, 2006

Rate this page del.icio.us  Digg slashdot StumbleUpon

Why Priceline.com went open source


This success story excerpt is reprinted from the Red Hat information center, where you can find case studies featuring a variety of migration and implementations.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Download this video: [QuickTime] [Ogg Theora]

Priceline.com regularly sees millions of page views and thousands of bookings per day. As an Internet-based travel service provider, downtime and outages are not an option. The company decided to shift 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.

The combination of Red Hat and JBoss has been a win-win for Priceline.com. Priceline.com's application availability runs >99.97 percent and hits 100 percent for most quarters. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the company has realized reduced 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 budgets 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 environments to reduce hardware costs and lower TCO.