Red Hat Honors Outstanding Open Source Advancement with Eighth Anual Red Hat Innovation Award

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA – RED HAT SUMMIT - APRIL 18, 2014 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the finalists for the eighth annual Red Hat Innovation Awards. The awards program recognizes customers, partners and communities for their outstanding use, innovation, and extension of Red Hat technology.

The Red Hat Innovation Awards finalists are recognized in five separate categories with category winners being selected by a panel of experts and ranked based on the uniqueness, complexity and magnitude of their Red Hat implementation. The panel of experts included: Lee Congdon, CIO, Red Hat; Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift, Red Hat; Carl Lehmann, research manager, Enterprise Architecture, Integration & Business Process Management, 451 Research; Laurent Lachal, cloud computing research lead, Ovum; Sean Michael Kerner, senior editor, eWEEK; and Fredric Paul, blogger, Network World and contributor, CIO, IT World, InfoWorld, and other publications.

The eighth Innovation Awards category winners will compete for the 2014 Red Hat Innovator of the Year award and will be recognized during Red Hat Summit in San Francisco. The 2014 Red Hat Innovator of the Year will be selected by the community via online voting and announced during a special awards ceremony hosted by Red Hat’s president and CEO Jim Whitehurst on April 15, 2014.

The 2014 Red Hat Innovation Awards winners include:

Category: Infrastructure
Recognizing striking flexibility, scalability, cost effectiveness, performance and security within an infrastructure.

• Winner: Centre for Railway Information Systems: The Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) runs a journey planning application that is integrated with Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporate (IRCTC)'s online internet ticketing system of Indian Railways. The current system serves travelers across the entire nation and with increasing site traffic, data processing challenges, such as a slow and often unresponsive booking system during peak times, were expected. CRIS turned to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for reliability and scalability. Now, the internet ticketing system, along with enhancements to CRIS' application, has reduced transaction response times and has processed a record high of more than 65,000 tickets during peak hours.

Category: Emerging Technologies
Recognizing the most successful illustration of cutting-edge deployment and business value from Red Hat’s emerging technology portfolio.

• Winner: Nanyang Technological University: Due to high computing demand by researchers and students, Nanyang Technological University, a research-intensive university in Singapore, sought an open hybrid cloud infrastructure to link the school's private cloud with its Amazon Web Services public cloud. The university deployed Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, Red Hat’s solution for building and managing an open, private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud based on datacenter virtualization and management technologies. Nanyang Technological University reduced costs by 30 percent by integrating their public and private clouds. The school increased flexibility afforded by the Red Hat and Amazon Web Services cloud solution during computing traffic spikes and provided secure data replication.

Category: Application Development
Recognizing the most outstanding employment of agile methodologies and superior overall performance of creating, maintaining, and deploying successful business applications – whether they are traditional, mobile or cloud – using Red Hat solutions to reduce costs by approximately $195M (USD).

• Winner: Secretariat of Social Development, Oportunidades (SEDESOL Oportunidades): SEDESOL Oportunidades program strives to counteract causes of extreme poverty in Mexico by providing economic incentives for educational, health, and nutritional improvement for families. SEDESOL Oportunidades determined the socioeconomic status of potential beneficiaries through surveys on paper, but the government agency developed a system to allow a virtual application to first, validate the information in real time to determine the eligibility of an applicant and second, minimize service times to potential beneficiaries. With the integration of Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SEDESOL Oportunidades deployed the survey on mobile devices. This reduced the survey response time from two hours to 50 minutes and has saved 1,200 tons of paper to date, as well as an estimated cost reduction in the operation of approximately $195M USD on 15 million surveys in three years. In addition, the department is now incorporating Red Hat JBoss BRMS, Red Hat JBoss Fuse, and Red Hat JBoss Data Grid into a future stage of their project.

Category: Ecosystem and Knowledge Exchange
Recognizing the most flourishing use of Red Hat’s expanding partner ecosystem to create innovative architectures based on Red Hat’s platform, middleware, cloud and/or storage solutions.

• Winner: Hennepin Home Health Care, Inc: Hennepin Home Health Care, Inc. (HHHC) found itself at an IT crossroads. The existing IT infrastructure needed a refresh, but with future healthcare regulations around online billing and record keeping becoming increasingly strict and difficult to anticipate, the new infrastructure needed an unprecedented degree of flexibility. Under unusually tight budget constraints, HHHC enlisted the expertise of Red Hat and Infrasupport, a Red Hat partner. Infrasupport has a long time relationship with HHHC and regularly moves IT challenges from impossible, to success, to routine. Virtualization has been the key to flexibility and Infrasupport proposed a virtualization solution based on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization with Microsoft Windows guests. With its new virtual infrastructure, HHHC is now positioned to rapidly respond to the unpredictable demands of healthcare regulators, and to try small experiments with new, cutting edge ideas and services and scale them up as opportunities present themselves.

Category: Accelerate, Integrate, Automate
Recognizing the best overall acceleration, integration, and automation of IT workloads using Red Hat products.

• Winner: OSDE Binario: The largest private healthcare company in Argentina, OSDE Binario, sought a more adaptable middleware solution to speed up application development. By building a new architecture with Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat JBoss BRMS, Red Hat JBoss Data Grid, and Red Hat JBoss Operations Network, the company can now make changes to applications more rapidly without interrupting user interaction. OSDE can now complete new application projects in less than four weeks instead of the previous minimum of four months. The Red Hat solution brought quicker response times and is OSDE is now able to store 40 customer requests per second and send a response within 60 milliseconds.