Greater Reliability Driving Customers to Choose Linux Over Windows

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – (NASDAQ:RHAT) Red Hat has said that Arabtec, the leading construction company in the United Arab Emirates, has migrated its mail servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in order to provide a high quality, secure and stable core application to its 3,200 administrative and management employees.

The construction company, whose current projects include the Dubai Tower (the tallest tower in the world), The Dubai International Finance center and the Conference Palace in Abu Dhabi, has seen reduced costs, recognised at least 5x performance gain and already experienced approximately 35% TCO improvement since the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

"Our use of technology is based upon two axis: production tools such as business specific software like Autocad and email. The latter email is the backbone of our business; we rely on it for most of all communications and coordination with our clients, partners and staff therefore we can't afford any downtime," said Muttia Marwan AL Khayyat, IT manager at Arabtec.

Arabtec's previous email service was hosted and maintained by an international third party company which both increased costs and suffered poor speed reliability such that the construction company had to re-evaluate its system. Supporting the channel in the region, Opennet, Red Hat's master distributor, with the help of its local channel partner eComputers, approached the construction company about the benefits of deploying an open source solution like Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Opennet MEA's mission is also to educate its channel partners such as eComputers on Red Hat's offering, and to assist them in demonstrating to their clients the added value of Red Hat solutions that improves IT total cost of ownership, enhancing collaboration, scalability, security and system consolidation and on how to help companies and organisations to operate on an IT platform that enables revenue growth without incurring substantial cost.

"The Opennet team has convinced us on the reliability and efficiency of deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux. More importantly they have done a great job explaining how it would have a direct impact on reducing the total cost of ownership allowing us to be able to reinvest, save on other projects or even hire more staff," continued Mr AL Khayyat.

In addition to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployment, Arabtec also subscribes to the Red Hat Network allowing its IT department to centralise and control patch management internally rather than thousands of miles away. Mr. AL Khayyat admitted that first he was anxious what the reaction of his mainly Microsoft trained staff would be with such a move, but after an intensive Red Hat training of the IT staff by Opennet and after seeing the impressive, immediate benefits of running the first Linux project he became even more encouraged to stay on the open source route.

"Red Hat is delighted to welcome Arabtec among its customers, which highlights the growing significance of the MEA economic area for Linux adoption," said Werner Knoblich, vice president of Europe, Middle East, and Asia markets at Red Hat. "Our channel partners such as Opennet, with its proven experience in IT services, are key to our business success in delivering enterprise class open source solutions and support to customers who want to benefit from increased performance and cost savings in these emerging markets."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is running on the email server in Arabtec's head office and the DNS, proxy and firewall servers in the company's remote sites. Red Hat Enterprise Linux sits on HP Intel Xeon architecture with SCSI hard disk driver with RAID hardware.

Arabtec is currently investigating the possibility of migrating all of its file servers, backup systems as well as all its desktops to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

"I am wondering what would my IT team do if we decide to go for a full migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, if such migration happens and everything is as stable as the mail server, I think the IT staff might have to go do some construction work on site or else they will get bored...", commented Mr AL Khayyat.