Leading Italian Organizations Rely on Red Hat Solutions for Performance Enhancements and Cost-Savings

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that three leading Italian organizations, including CSI-Piemonte, one of the top fifteen software and services companies in Italy, Iride Energia, a leading thermal and electric energy provider in Italy and the City of Marsala have found success with Red Hat solutions. Each has experienced heightened performance, cost-savings and increased reliability with solutions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Support.

CSI-Piemonte, responsible for delivering IT solutions to public bodies in the Piemonte region of Italy, conducted extensive research as it searched for a platform for the development of business services for local public administration. Ultimately, it selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for the solutions' well-established reputation, professional support and for their rapid rate of innovation. The implementation project began in 2006 and was carried out in-house with Red Hat Support. The new platform is a hosted solution that is used by CSI-Piemonte customers to run and develop their own applications, which can be used by all public bodies in Piemonte. With Red Hat solutions, the platform guarantees superior service levels, cost-savings and high reliability, enabling CSI-Piemonte's clients to concentrate on their core business.

We selected Red Hat solutions to offer ourselves and companies in our region a real competitive advantage, and to have a concrete meeting point for the community, said Luca Gioppo, manager of the Open Source Area at CSI-Piemonte. I can happily say that Red Hat solutions fully meet our expectations in terms of reliability, robustness and performance. The economic benefit of this solution is extremely plain to see, especially when you consider the support costs.

Similarly, Iride Energia, part of Gruppo Iride, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the standard operating system in its IT infrastructure with each of the company's 35 enterprise servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Oracle and SAP software certifications, used widely throughout the company, played a significant role in Iride Energia's selection of Red Hat solutions. The entire migration project was completed in two months and the elimination of software licenses has provided cost savings that have been reallocated to update all of Iride Energia's IT hardware, delivering additional system improvements. The hardware, consisting of Bull NovaScale servers based on Itanium2 and HP ProLiant servers, in all production environments has been recently renewed and equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux was a strategic choice for Iride Energia and the solution is providing great support for our business, said Roberto Ganio Mego, system administrator at Iride Energia. With our migration to the new Red Hat platform, performance has been greatly enhanced, systems have become more reliable and we're experiencing significant improvements in our global productivity.

A pioneer in local government innovation, the City of Marsala Town Council has been offering its citizens free internet-based services for years. Recently, it looked for a new solution that could provide lowered costs relating to IT updates and assistance, while maintaining the large number of services available to its citizens. After several months of testing, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was chosen for its cost-effective platform and reliable services. The implementation was completed internally and Red Hat Enterprise Linux was deployed on the majority of the Town Council servers during the summer of 2007. The Marsala Town Council has also experienced an increase in the reliability and security of its infrastructure — an important consideration for the Town Council, whose web servers are located within the internal infrastructure and not hosted with external providers.

The economic benefits of our solution have been immediate. In the first year alone, we were able to save more than euro100,000, said Sergio Cacioppo, IT Area manager at the Marsala Town Council. In terms of performance, things changed immediately for the better. The solution we adopted has made it possible to speed up all the calculation processes, reducing the times involved by more than 70 percent. Also, labor-intensive procedures, such as the reconstruction of the indexes that previously required up to eight hours in the past, are now completed in just a few minutes.

All three Italian organizations are considering further implementation of Red Hat solutions.

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