The Emirates Group IT Standardizes IT Operations on Red Hat's Portfolio

Provider of open source systems Red Hat (News - Alert) has announced that the Emirates Group IT, operating under the brand name Mercator, a provider of business technology systems, has standardized its IT operations on a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware after a three month pilot program.

 

The Emirates Group migrated approximately 80 percent of its comparable servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware in order to simplify its datacenter and reduce the total cost of operations for Web server technologies.

 

Red Hat’s middleware system portfolio offers a certified and supported platform for other open source technologies. Emirates Group officials said that this was a critical factor when it was deciding to standardise on open source technologies.

 

Company officials said that the Emirates Group IT / Mercator strategy to migrate to JBoss was to first divert new applications for deployment on this platform, allowing Emirates Group IT to build capability, before applications were promoted to the production environment.

 

The migration occurred with Red Hat and provided training and support to the Emirates Group IT department to ensure a more gradual adoption process.

 

Additionally, Emirates Group IT/Mercator has a complex IT infrastructure made up of a variety of software and hardware technologies.

 

Patrick Naef, divisional senior vice president at Emirates Group IT and head of Mercator, said that migrating to a new standard can be highly complex in an organisation the size of the Emirates Group/Mercator.

 

“Change management and confidence in vendor support are critical factors to successfully adopt a new standard- this is why we chose Red Hat,” Naef said.

 

Earlier this month, Red Hat announced that customers can deploy fully supported virtualization environments that combine Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.