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Awards

2010 Red Hat and JBoss Innovation Awards

Red Hat is pleased to announce the 2010 Red Hat and JBoss Innovation Award Winners.

The Innovation Awards were created to recognize the technological achievements, outstanding use, innovation and extension of Red Hat and JBoss solutions by Red Hat customers, partners and the open source community.

From the finalists, one Red Hat Innovator of the Year and one JBoss Innovator of the Year will each be selected via online voting, and announced during the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Boston on June 25, 2010. The Red Hat and JBoss Innovation Awards finalists are recognized in five separate categories. In addition, a sixth category recognizes a finalist that is deploying a combined solution from Red Hat's platform and middleware portfolios.

Congratulations to the 2010 Red Hat and JBoss Innovators of the Year, Just Dial and Travel Channel! Read their stories below.

Category Winners

Listed below are the 2010 Red Hat Innovator of the Year winners in the following categories: Optimized Systems, Superior Alternatives, Extensive Ecosystem, Carved Out Costs, and Outstanding Open Source Architecture. Each category, except for the last, features both a Red Hat winner and a JBoss winner. You may vote for any of the following category winners to be named 2010 Innovator of the Year.

Optimized Systems

Recognition of striking performance, scalability and/or usability enhancements delivered with open source solutions.

Red Hat winner:
LifeSpring Hospitals

LifeSpring Hospitals, is a growing chain of maternity hospitals providing affordable, high-quality healthcare to low-income women in India. Through its network of medium-sized (20-25 beds) hospitals, its goal is to provide safe, clean and affordable maternity services. LifeSpring Hospitals was selected for standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization to build a high degree of collaboration amongst its member hospitals, improve service delivery to customers and facilitate systems to increase productivity and responsibility. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, LifeSpring Hospitals has been able to lower IT costs, simplify management achieve near zero downtime. Read the full submission.

JBoss winner:
Travel Channel

Travel Channel was launched in 1987 and is owned by Scripps Networks Interactive. Travel Channel is available in more than 95 million US cable homes (Nielsen Universe Estimate, August 2009) and is the place for consumers to satisfy their urges to go, see and do. Travel Channel was selected for its implementation of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Operations Network to manage and monitor its website to ensure visitors have positive experiences with no downtime or viewing difficulties. Travel Channel used open source solutions to enhance risk management and capacity planning, increase throughput 20-fold and to increase application availability. Read the full submission.

Superior Alternatives

Recognition of the most successful migration from proprietary solutions to open source alternatives.

Red Hat winner:
Citigroup

Citigroup, has approximately 200 million customer accounts in more than 140 countries. Through Citicorp and Citi Holdings, Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services and wealth management. Citi was selected for its operating platform migration from its own Linux Standard Operating Environment (SOE) and Novell SUSE Linux to standardize on Red Hat Enterprise Linux across both x86 servers and IBM System z hardware platforms. Read the full submission.

JBoss winner:
State of Tennessee

State of Tennesseee Office of Information Resources (OIR), provides direction, planning, resources, execution and coordination in managing the information systems needs of the State of Tennessee. OIR is a division within the Department of Finance & Administration (F&A) and serves State agencies, departments and commissions. The State of Tennessee nomination was selected for its migration from proprietary application server to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The migration resulted in substantial savings on hardware and licensing costs for all new deployments, increased performance, stability, reliability and availability. Read the full submission.

Extensive Ecosystem

Recognition of the use of Red Hat or JBoss' expanding partner ecosystem to create innovative architectures based on open source solutions.

Red Hat winner:
BNZ

BNZ, a subsidiary of the National Australia Bank Group, has helped individuals, farmers and businesses with their financial goals for nearly 150 years. BNZ was selected for its migration of a proprietary platform on Intel and Sun SPARC servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z10 order to move towards their goal to become carbon neutral by September 2010, and to create a disaster recovery solution. Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with Red Hat Network Satellite, Oracle database, ESB, Process Server, TX and MQ, BNZ was able to reduce its carbon footprint for its customer facing systems by 30 percent. Read the full submission.

JBoss winner:
Nationwide Mutual Insurance

Nationwide Mutual Insurance, based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the largest and strongest diversified insurance and financial services organizations in the U.S. The company provides customers a full range of insurance and financial services, including auto insurance, motorcycle, boat, homeowners, life insurance, farm, commercial insurance, administrative services, annuities, mortgages, mutual funds, pensions, long-term savings plans and health and productivity services. Nationwide was chosen for its deployment of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform deployed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Oracle DBMS and the Azul Java Appliance. . The new infrastructure improved application response times by 25% and improved resource utilization by 40% through a reduction of 10 JVM instances to four, resulting in lower operating costs and saving hundreds of man-hours in deployment overhead. Read the full submission.

Carved Out Costs

Recognition of customers who have leveraged open source solutions to significantly cut costs and extract added value from existing systems.

Red Hat winner:
Just Dial

Just Dial, is India's No.1 local search company that bridges the gap between buyers and sellers by helping buyers find the right providers of products and services, while helping sellers improve the efficiency of their marketing channels. It caters to over 25 million unique users spread across 240 cities in India. It also offers its services via Voice, Wap and SMS. Now Just Dial is also launched in America on 1800Justdial. Just Dial was selected for its migration from a Microsoft DOS-based client server system to a web-based system powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Just Dial was able to increase the flexibility and decrease IT and licensing costs by migrating from proprietary software to open source solutions. Read the full submission.

JBoss winner:
The Administración Nacional de la Seguridad Social (Anses)

The Administración Nacional de la Seguridad Social (ANSES), is a decentralized government agency for retired and pensioned citizens care within the scope of the Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Security of the Government of Argentina. ANSES was selected for its design of Business Rules Generation Assistant (APRN, for its Spanish acronym) running on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss BRMS and JBoss Data Services Platform. The APRN system will help the organization to create a single repository for retired and pensioned citizens payment rules. It will provide a flexible environment to easily adapt rules and a simulation environment that will execute the rules against a unified citizen data view created from different legacy systems. ANSES will have the capability to better understand the economical impact of such changes. With more than 50 applications in production, Anses is continuing to move away from closed legacy systems that cost more than two millon dollars to operate yearly. Read the full submission.

Outstanding Open Source Architecture

Recognition of the use of both Red Hat and JBoss with related partner offerings to create innovative architectures based on open source solutions.

Union Pacific Corporation

Union Pacific Corporation, is one of America's leading transportation companies. Its principal operating company, Union Pacific Railroad, is one of North America's premier railroad franchises, covering 23 states across the western two-thirds of the United States. Union Pacific Railroad was selected for its migration of its legacy mainframe environment to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based virtualized distributed IT infrastructure. The company also utilized JBoss Enterprise Application Platform in an enterprise Java-hosted environment. Read the full submission.