Hilti Standardizes Global Mission-Critical Systems On Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SAP® Solutions

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Hilti Corporation has migrated its critical systems running SAP® applications, including SAP Business Suite, SAP ERP, SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) and the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform, from Tru64 UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS). The migration to Red Hat solutions has delivered increased performance and reduced electricity costs and has provided the company with a long-term platform strategy that aims to enable the Hilti IT team to be highly responsive to the increasing requirements of a global manufacturing sales and service organization.

Hilti Corporation, headquartered in Schaan in the Principality of Liechtenstein, is a world-renowned manufacturer of leading-edge technology for the global construction industry. The company's sales and service organization of 20,000 global employees works directly with customers in more than 120 countries around the world, handling more than 200,000 customer contacts every day.

When HP announced it would discontinue development and support for Tru64 UNIX and Alpha Server in 2004, Hilti looked for an alternative platform for its critical systems.

"We were experiencing a classic case of vendor lock-in and the expertise our team had built over many years was suddenly depreciating rapidly," said Michael Hagmann, head of Enterprise Server Technology at Hilti Corporation. "Trying to extend the lifecycle of the Tru64/Alpha platform was not an option, as we would quickly run into maintenance and hardware issues. We started evaluating alternative platforms with our previous experience in mind."

Hilti's enterprise server team had only three months to evaluate hardware and software alternatives before making the final investment recommendation to the Executive Board. A strong argument in favor of choosing Red Hat solutions was that all of Hilti's application vendors, including SAP, have certified their products to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The organization's largest and most critical systems rely on SAP Business Suite, SAP ERP and SAP CRM, each with more than 5TB of data. As an SAP customer, Hilti wanted to consolidate, standardize and expand its SAP software-based environment to improve its business performance and enhance its systems reporting capabilities, all while migrating to a new platform.

We migrated to SAP applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant servers after evaluation and testing," said Martin Petry, CIO at Hilti Corporation. "Since the migration, we have experienced increased performance by more than 100 percent. We also reduced IT costs with a commoditized architecture. Having a tight level of integration between the Red Hat and SAP support organizations gives us the confidence to continue along this path and further reduce our costs by migrating all of our SAP environment to Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

"The combination of SAP solutions on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has delivered significant improvements in performance," said Hagmann. "And the servers are very power-efficient, which means cost savings and a reduced carbon footprint. As a company driven by innovation and passionate engineers, we're very happy to have made this big step to standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and industry-standard servers."

"Our customers are looking increasingly to open, standards-based platforms to create scalable, high-performance business applications," said Helge Deller, head of the SAP Linux Lab, SAP. "In today's challenging economic environment, supporting open source alternatives, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is important to SAP customers. Running SAP solutions together with Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers added value to customers that meets their business and technology needs."

To read the full Hilti Corporation case study, visit www.customers.redhat.com.

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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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