Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg), the world's leading solution provider for the print media industry, built an interactive customer portal, www.MyHeidelberg.com, using JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform to create an interactive site to enhance its customer relationships and provide a unified global brand presence. With the successful portal project, Heidelberg has since migrated its proprietary application platform to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, in order to reduce costs, and increase the performance of its web applications.
Based in Heidelberg, Germany, with development and production sites in seven countries and around 250 sales offices across the globe, the company supports around 200,000 customers worldwide. The company develops and produces precision printing presses that produce high volume items such as brochures, magazines, folding carton boxes and product labels. Heidelberg's printing products and software enable its customers to print high volumes, quickly at high quality and in color at an affordable price and convert the printed material into the desired format.
Heidelberg launched a corporate-wide web initiative to develop a strategic architecture and customer-centric web portal, to strengthen customer relationships, consolidate information and services, provide easier access to information, and increase revenues through improved communications with customers.
"In addition to the JBoss platforms, we evaluated proprietary and open source solutions, but we selected JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform on the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform due to its ability to deliver an agile, reusable framework. Coupled with the benefits of open source, this solution helped us to reduce costs and eliminate the risk of vendor lock-in," said Mathias Berg, Director, Global Web Systems at Heidelberg. "Although we had limited open source experience, we were confident in our decision due to JBoss' established technology platform, the highly regarded enterprise support, and the expertise of Red Hat Consulting."
The new customer portal integrated seamlessly into Heidelberg's existing platform and offered flexibility and reliability to adapt the local websites to the respective market requirements. The scalable solution is equipped for steadily increasing numbers of users, which initially tallied more than 5,500 registered users and has been growing monthly by approximately 5 to 10 percent.
"Previously, we had a solid web presence for our customers, but it was more of an online brochure and lacked interactivity," said Berg. "The MyHeidelberg.com portal, based on JBoss' portal platform, creates a true value-add for our customers. With more and more customers actively consuming information online, we needed to offer a powerful and feature-rich web presence that would provide our customers with a single online destination for all of their needs. MyHeidelberg.com provides a centralized web portal with tailored information for each customer with one gateway, one URL, one password, and one login."
At an early stage of the customer portal project, Heidelberg made the decision to work with Red Hat Consulting in order to facilitate knowledge transfer, have a closer relationship with JBoss, and to have access to the engineers and developers behind the open source technology.
Heidelberg's use of JBoss for its customer portal and web application server has resulted in improved customer web presence with a central portal, reduced costs, excellent support and continuous advancements of its portal software and has eliminated issues resulting from vendor lock-in.
"All over the world, the name Heidelberg is synonymous with state-of-the art technology, top quality, and closeness to the customer.We set the benchmark high for ourselves and we expect the same level of quality from all of our vendors," said Michael Neff, chief information officer at Heidelberg. "JBoss absolutely delivered all we needed, by providing high availability, performance and scalability. Due to the business model, we realized significant cost savings, faster ROI, and freedom from vendor lock-in."
To read the full Heidelberg case study, visit www.customers.redhat.com. For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.
About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world's leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for five consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.
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- 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.
