Red Hat announced that EsSalud, a state-owned insurance and service provider in Peru offering medical and economic benefits that cover eight million regularly insured parties and successors, has experienced success with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. With the solution's virtualization capabilities, the company has stabilized its organization-wide systems through a swift, transparent and cost-effective implementation project.
EsSalud was faced with challenges resulting from its aging information systems, which consisted of outdated, non-integrated technology that caused trouble with monitoring and control across its 362 National Assurance Centers. With a wide array of operating systems, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Novell, AIX and others, spread across its centers, the company could no longer maintain the mutli-platform support for its main system. The system's disconnectedness led to a weak administration and sluggish monitoring.
To reliably and cost-effectively centralize the information of its National Assistance Centers, EsSalud turned to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on HP hardware. Because EsSalud’s Health Benefits Core System was developed on Foxpro 2.6, it required two virtualized versions of the operating system. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 virtualization, the two versions were converged within 30 days to support Foxpro. Ultimately, EsSalud was able to change the overall administration and distribution scheme of its National Assurance Centers’ IT infrastructure.
"The virtualization capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 were a decisive factor in our company’s resolve to adopt this platform. In addition, we looked to Red Hat solutions for platform stability and security," said Luis Martín Jiménez Chirinos, systems developer manager at EsSalud. "Other alternatives initially considered included Novell, SCO and Microsoft products. Each had strengths, but in the case of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, we found all the strengths we sought converged in the same product."
Today, EsSalud enjoys a centralized administration of its servers installed across the company’s Assistance Centers. It has also experienced stability in its organization-wide systems, effective and stable communication capabilities and access security for system management, all for costs lower than originally budgeted.
"The experience was transcendent. We’ve seen large benefits at a low cost, with low implementation time," said Chirinos. "For the future, we have plans to use Red Hat solutions for our inventory and terminal control solutions."