We’re excited to announce that Red Hat, Unisys and the New York State Unified Court System have been selected as a GTC Best Solutions Showcase award winner based on our joint work with the New York State Courts’ Family Case Management System. The awards, presented by Government Technology magazine, are given annually as part of the GTC East Conference.

What made our collective work with the New York State Courts’ Family Case Management System so award-worthy?

New York’s Office of Court Administration (NYS-OCA) developed the custom Family Case Management System, consolidating disparate systems into a statewide system, enabling judges, courts and other agencies (such as New York’s child support offices) to access real-time information across various jurisdictions. As NYS-OCA expanded its adoption of application servers, the monetary costs associated with proprietary solutions became prohibitive. As a result, the state of New York migrated to JBoss Application Server. While the majority of the migration was seamlessly completed by analysts and programmers at NYS-OCA, one of the state’s major applications had been Web-service enabled with many proprietary hooks. Unisys completed this difficult piece in four short weeks, capping off an entire project migration timeframe of five months and which included nearly one million lines of code. The new JBoss cluster is comparable to the previous solution in terms of performance and scalability, with the added bonus of a much faster build and deployment cycle.

We’ve heard from the project and technical service managers that the new Family Case Management System processes nearly 700,000 cases each year, making it one of the Court’s most mission-critical applications. With the Family Case Management System, all data is housed centrally and procedures are now standardized, creating enormous efficiencies for both the New York agencies that need to have access to this real-time information and also the citizens of New York. By migrating to open source software, New York State Courts is saving tax payers over $75,000 annually in maintenance fees and $500,000 in licensing fees over time.

Now that’s value. And we’re proud that Government Technology agreed.