Red Hat announced the winners of the first annual Red Hat Innovation Awards. The Awards are designed to recognize Red Hat users, customers and partners who stand out for improving processes, overcoming technology challenges and enhancing their bottom line through Red Hat and JBoss solutions. Winners were selected in six categories, designed to highlight innovative and exemplary uses of Red Hat technologies.
Recognition will be given to the six winning innovators during a ceremony at the third annual Red Hat Summit, taking place May 9-11 at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina. Of the six category leaders, one winner will be chosen via online voting as the Red Hat Innovator of the Year. The Innovator of the Year will be announced live during the Innovation Awards ceremony at the Red Hat Summit. All six winners will also participate in a panel discussion of their original success stories during a session at the Red Hat Summit.
"It was exciting to participate as a judge in the kickoff year of the Red Hat Innovation Awards, giving customers recognition for their inventive project solutions," said Red Hat Innovation Award Judge, Michael Tiemann, President of the Open Source Initiative. "The submissions in each category displayed original, cunning work with Red Hat and JBoss solutions that will serve as inspiration to other potential and existing customers. Each nominee deserves to be congratulated for their captivating stories of technical achievement."
The Red Hat Innovation Award winners include:
Joint Red Hat/JBoss Deployment
DST Health Solutions, a health plan solutions and outsourcing services company, was selected for its use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite as development tools to build a consumer-directed healthcare product. This market-leading solution yielded immediate customer traction with increased market visibility and corporate leadership, while remaining affordable and scalable.
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Implementation
Warner Music Group, one of the world's major music content companies, was selected for its implementation of JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite to create a customer asset management system with a Service-Oriented Architecture that enables efficient website data management and maximum scalability across its rapidly growing extended enterprise at an affordable price, with no vendor lock-in and with easy integration for vendors and partners.
Increased Return on Investment
ProQuest CSA, a leading information technology company, was selected for its use of Red Hat Linux 7.2 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 as a cost-effective, fast-deploying and performance-boosting solution. Red Hat Linux 7.2 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 provided third party vendor support, horizontal scaling, enormous capacity growth, increased reliability and millions of dollars in cost savings.
Ecosystem
McKesson Provider Technologies, a division of McKesson Corporation, the world's largest healthcare IT services company, was selected as the first company to employ the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform to integrate its healthcare software suite of applications on one unified platform. The move saved approximately one million dollars in combined software and hardware costs and allowed the company to provide a more robust and enterprise-ready solution for patient care.
Emerging and Leading Edge Technologies
Comcast Corporation is the nation's leading provider of cable, entertainment and communications products and services. The company's National Engineering and Technical Operations Systems Back Office Architecture group was selected for its use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to create a flexible, cost-effective and highly efficient lab environment that is expediting the development, integration and testing efforts for systems and applications related to the next generation of the Internet Protocol (IP), IPv6.
Innovation In Government
Hill Air Force Base, a major division for the U.S. Air Force, was selected for its use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to develop a fast, cost-effective, secure and reliable system that eliminated system crashes, simplified its previous complicated operating environment, reduced the load time of the Base's largest application from twelve to three hours and amounted to just two percent of the cost of the previous operating system, saving millions of dollars for the Base.
Online voting for the Red Hat Innovator of the Year is open until midnight May 10, 2007. For more information on the Red Hat Innovation Awards, or to vote for the Innovator of the Year, please visit www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2007/innovate/. For more information on Red Hat, please visit www.redhat.com.