Boeing company Jeppesen has migrated its business-critical logistics systems to open-source Red Hat virtualisation technology to benefit from cost savings.

Jeppesen develops crew and fleet optimisation systems for the global transportation industry, and has UK sites in Newbury, Crawley and Maidenhead. It will now standardise its business-critical software build systems on the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation platform.

As a result, Jeppesen aims to achieve both reduced hardware and product time to market costs over the first three years of deployment.

The system "has the necessary performance levels to enable us to achieve our cost-saving targets” said Annika Hansson, IT manager at Jeppesen, who said it would also help "get the most out of our current hardware".

Jeppesen uses a method of “continuous integration” in its software engineering process, whereby any new developments to the software undergo continuous and thorough automated testing.

“We cannot afford any downtime of our build systems as this would mean that we cannot provide critical updates and fixes for our customers whose businesses depend on our optimisation software,” added Kalle Kiviaho, systems administrator at Jeppesen.

“Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation provides the reliability and scalability that we demand and has given us confidence to trust our business to run on it.”

Meanwhile, server spending has been weak in 2010, as enterprises continue their cost-cutting programmes, with server virtualisation one reason hardware sales are down.

Source: http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3244068/boeing-unit-cuts-costs-with-open-source-virtualisation/