JBoss Innovator of the Year Announced at JBoss World Orlando

During this year’s very successful JBoss World event, which took place last week in Orlando, Fla., I was given the opportunity to meet and exchange stories with some of Red Hat and JBoss’ most distinguished customers. Our customers were at the event to speak with our engineers and developers, swap experiences and how-to’s with other JBoss-technology users and attend sessions to learn about the things that we have up our sleeve for the future. Some also came to be recognized for their impressive and unique implementations of JBoss solutions through the second-annual JBoss Innovation Awards.

This year’s JBoss Innovation Awards kicked off in October and we announced our eight category finalists in January. The finalists included:

• Emerging and Leading-edge Technologies: Big Lots
• Joint JBoss-Red Hat Deployment: CompuCredit
• Migration: Sakonnet
• User Experience: Daiwa Securities
• Business Process Automation: SK Telecom/Helio
• Ecosystem: Rivet Logic for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions
• Increased Return on Investment: Alintec for the Province of Bergamo
• Service-Oriented Architecture Implementation: Vivat Consulting for US Trust

Read the full success stories of our finalists.

We gave our online audience the ability to vote on which of the stories from above was the most innovative, and promised that the winner would be acknowledged at JBoss World Orlando as the JBoss Innovator of the Year. On Friday, we proudly crowned Rivet Logic for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions our 2008 JBoss Innovator of the Year.

Rivet Logic is a provider of professional services focused on open source solutions, and Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions is a premier provider of educational and career services for individuals, schools and businesses. Together, Rivet Logic and Kaplan were selected by our online audience of voters for their use of Alfresco’s content management platform in support of the upgrade of Kaplan’s online presence from a legacy system to a JBoss-centric solution. The teams employed JBoss Seam (and Facelets), JBoss Application Server, Hibernate and jBPM to create a next-generation platform for the www.kaptest.com site that can deliver personalized applications and dynamic, targeted content. The results include a 26x performance improvement over the legacy content authoring/delivery system, much faster page load times and a “fresher” web presence for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions. I encourage you to read Rivet Logic and Kaplan’s full winning success story.

With the impressive, all-time-high attendee numbers, the announcements of Enterprise Acceleration, our JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, BlackTie and other community project investments and finally the recognition of our most innovative customers, JBoss World Orlando was a fulfilling event. We hope you’ll join us at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Mass. in June, where we’ll present our second Red Hat Innovator of the Year and other Innovation Award winners.