RED HAT : Powers $2.5 Million in Cost Savings for Santos

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Santos, a leading supplier of oil and gas for Australia and Asia, has achieved cost savings of $2.5 million with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In addition, the energy pioneer has gained greater stability and faster performance, helping the company reduce its global carbon footprint.

With more than 5,000 staff and headquartered in Adelaide, Southern Australia, Santos delivers a high-performing business through strong oil and gas production in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2009, Santos was tasked with finding a new application delivery system that would improve performance and reduce cost. With a complex environment to manage, an increase in data, mounting licensing costs and a deficiency in support, Santos sought out a direct replacement for its main proprietary thin client system in order to avoid the license outlay and the cost of replacing its workstations. After extensive investigation, Santos turned to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and an open source thin client solution, and has been reaping the rewards since the migration.

"For what we need, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was always going to be the underlying system for us, both from a development and production environment perspective," said Andy Moore, IS Manager, Santos. "Red Hat has been a platform of choice for the oil and gas industry for some time because it's a preferred development platform for the major geoscience software vendors."

In addition to achieving immediate savings, Red Hat technology has allowed Santos' highly valued geoscientists the ability to perform their jobs more efficiently, making them more productive as the company looks to increase its oil and gas reserves. Additional benefits also include a reduction of more than 300,000 KWh in environmental power per year, reduced office cooling requirements and a reduced carbon footprint through workstation removal.

"Red Hat has been a refreshing change for Santos because it immediately delivered a faster, cheaper, and more stable platform, but it also offered many other operational benefits that quickly became apparent," said Moore. "Necessity is the mother of invention and we managed to come up with the solution that would simplify administration, boost performance, lower costs, add functionality, improve security, and even save power, all in one open source step -- a huge success all round. Introducing Red Hat has really provided us with a win-win situation."

To learn more about how Santos is using Red Hat technology to be a high-performing organization, read the full case study at www.redhat.com/customersuccess.

For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions and an S&P 500 company, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for seven 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 virtualization, applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

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Red Hat, Inc.
Karin Bakis, 978-392-1096
kbakis@redhat.com

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