Nigerian Bank Chooses Red Hat and JBoss SOA Solutions for Mission-Critical Banking Applications
Bank PHB improves flexibility, reliability and performance with Red Hat solutions
Dubai, GITEX – 23 October, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s
leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Bank
PHB, one of Nigeria’s top ten banks, has migrated its core
mission-critical banking applications to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and
the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. Bank PHB migrated to Red Hat’s open
source solutions to achieve the next step in scalability, performance
and the ability to handle heavy workloads and achieve cost reduction
more effectively than with other proprietary software platforms.
Bank PHB has emerged as one of Nigeria’s fastest growing banks with 1.8
million customers, making it the eighth largest bank in the country by
both profitability and size. The bank has one of the most innovative
financial product portfolios in the region and with its recent
acquisition of Gambia’s International Bank for Commerce (IBC) it has
even more plans to grow. To facilitate this growth successfully, Bank
PHB required an IT solution that is based on open and flexible
architecture, with higher performance and manageable total cost of
ownership. It also desired a solution with no proprietary lock-in in
order to allow the bank to integrate all of the different banking
applications and products from its varied acquisitions.
Bank PHB, with the assistance of Red Hat Advanced Business Partner,
Qrios, has migrated to a cluster of commodity hardware, including 23
IBM x86 X3850 multi-core servers. The servers are now equipped with Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, which replaced the previous IBM eServer
pSeries servers that ran Unix AIX. The full solution incorporates IBM
Intel servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, built using the
JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, including the JBoss Enterprise
Application Platform on the web front end to provide a highly-available
client by implementing the clustering, caching and fail-over
capabilities of JBoss. Bank PHB also uses Red Hat Network Satellite and
JBoss Operations Network to monitor and manage updates. The new Red Hat
Enterprise Linux servers all run the Temenos T24-core banking
application that is built on an open architecture and uses established
standards such as HTTP, XML and J2EE for a variety of banking modules
including retail, private banking, treasury and Islamic banking.
"Migrating our systems to Red Hat and JBoss solutions was a strategic
choice for us," said Henry Okoede, chief technology officer at Bank
PHB. "Cost saving was not the only reason we went with open source,
though it was certainly icing on the cake. Our decision was driven by
the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the JBoss Enterprise SOA
Platform provide constant innovation and the flexibility that enables
us to develop products that we can launch to market faster, while
making sure that all our systems are fully integrated and optimized to
communicate with each other flawlessly. We have also felt that the
service provided by Red Hat professional support was also one of the
best we have ever experienced with a vendor."
"The communication and middleware tier had to be able to support the
total bank community with acceptable response times and guaranteed
delivery of messages to the Temenos T24-core banking application," said
Mosh Adetoro, Technical Director at Qrios. "Bank PHB chose JBoss
Enterprise Application Platform, including JBoss Messaging, a Java
Message Server (JMS), to ensure delivery of the messages to the core
application."
"Bank PHB Bank is another great example of how open source provides
real value for our financial services customers," said Werner Knoblich,
vice president of the EMEA region at Red Hat. "JBoss technology,
combined with professional support from Red Hat, has enabled PHB Bank
to deploy an enterprise-ready robust platform that meets both the
performance and reliability demanded by the financial sector, with the
major advantage of flexibility provided by open source."
For more information on Red Hat, please visit www.europe.redhat.com
For more information about JBoss solutions, visit www.jboss.com
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more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com
About Bank PHB
Bank PHB, a leading financial services institution is Nigeria’s
emerging icon for banking excellence. Our strategic intent is to build
a national and diversified franchise by creating superior value for all
our stakeholders through unrivaled customer service experience,
superior shareholder value, a conducive workplace, and commitment to
corporate citizenship.
Bank PHB has emerged as one of Nigeria’s fastest growing banks with
profit before tax of N10.28 billion, total assets and contingents of
N480 billion as at June 2007 making it Nigeria’s eighth biggest bank in
profitability and size, and seventh biggest bank in deposits. It is
significant that Bank PHB since its merger in December 2005 has
maintained an average growth rate that is about three times the banking
industry average growth rate.
http://www.bankphb.com/live/general/index.php
About Qrios
Founded in 1998, Qrios is West Africa’s major Linux and open source
service provider. As a Red Hat Advance Partner, it provides support for
the most recognized open source brand in the world. Through its
consulting practice, it has consistently used open source
Infrastructure, Integration and Innovation to deliver measurable
business value to its enterprise customers; its focus being on the
major players in the financial services, telecoms and Oil and gas
sectors of the region.
Leveraging on Red Hat’s professional services and a budding local team
Qrios has successfully delivered projects based on almost every Red Hat
solution from the operating system, database availability to SOA and
middleware solutions.
Qrios is a regional Red Hat Certified Training Partner.
About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is
headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 60 offices spanning the globe.
CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for
four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey.
Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating
system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications,
management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions,
including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers
support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide.
Learn more: http://www.redhat.com .
