Skanska leaves UNIX in favor of Red Hat

Skanska achieves higher quality, stability and expects 30 percent reduction in costs

ESTOCOLMO -

Red Hat (NASDAQ: RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, today announced that it has successfully moved Skanska's business-critical intelligence systems from Unix to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux solution powered by Intel-based hardware. Red Hat's collaboration with Skanska has resulted in cost savings within Skanska's IT infrastructure department and has improved the performance of the company's servers and applications.

Skanska had been using an Oracle business intelligence solution that required a stable, high availability platform, for four years. When Skanska updated to Oracle 11i, it was also necessary to upgrade company hardware in order to enable all features in the new application. To minimize the considerable investment required to perform this upgrade using their old Unix based Sun Solaris platform solution, Skanska evaluated various alternatives from the open source community.

"Security, stability and cost efficiency are important aspects of our business. We found these qualities within the alternative solutions offered by the open source community, especially from Red Hat who provided packaged solutions that include the level of support we require. Importantly, Red Hat has extensive documented experience in enterprise solutions," says Sara Lewerentz, responsible for IT infrastructure at Skanska Sweden.

Skanska IT Solutions chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux coupled with Oracle's E-business Suite to standardize processes within the finance department. As part of the new solution, a parallel Oracle RAC database runs on 12 Dell Intel-based servers, each of which have four processors. The solution also includes storage architecture including two Dell/EMC CX700s with a storage capacity of 70 TB.

The new business intelligence system serves more than 5,000 users where the ability to minimize downtime and maximize security is crucial. Additionally, the system handles 6,000 transactions daily, a workload which demands a high degree of stability and security.

"The greatest benefit for us has been that we have already lowered our operating costs. Every saved dollar is a dollar earned as long as security and stability are guaranteed. We have achieved all of our goals in this project so far and expect to reduce costs by 30%," says Sara Lewerentz, responsible for IT Infrastructure at Skanska. The day after platform migration, all 5,000 users returned to their desks and could continue their work without interruption. The process of cleaning databases, performing calculations and archiving material became much faster thanks to higher performance within the systems.

Skanska is looking forward to realizing calculated savings of about 30 percent of IT costs. The company also plans to standardize other modules as far as possible in order to minimize any interference between systems and to avoid any costly developments of customized applications.

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, please visit http://www.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source and Linux provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with satellite offices spanning the globe. Red Hat is leading Linux and open source solutions into the mainstream by making high quality, low cost technology accessible. Red Hat provides operating system software along with middleware, applications and management solutions. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide and through top-tier partnerships. Red Hat's open source strategy offers customers a long term plan for building infrastructures that are based on and leverage open source technologies with focus on security and ease of management. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com

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Common with UNIX footnote

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  • About Red Hat
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