NH Hoteles: Customers stay for less with open source

During a recent trip to Barcelona I opted to stay at a NH Hotel. Little did I know in choosing this safe, clean, and slightly hip business-oriented chain, my bias toward open source was showing through. As it turns out, NH Hoteles runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux, along with JBoss solutions. Funny, that.

However, much as I like to think that I'm supporting open source in my sleep, I find the reasons for NH Hoteles choice of open-source Red Hat more enlightening:

"After implementing Red Hat solutions, we benefited from a reliable technology infrastructure that was fault-tolerant, robust, supported by open technology and standards-based. The implementation of Red Hat solutions was a success and has exceeded the objectives we defined at the beginning of the project," said Ricardo Mardomingo, IT manager of NH Hoteles. "We experienced an impressive increase in system stability with improved platform availability that reached 100 percent after migration."

Due to the management capacity of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform through JBoss Operations Network, NH Hoteles has also experienced greater control of its current architecture. The solution has provided ease-of-use and scalability, and has led the company to consider the suitability of implementing additional Red Hat solutions throughout the rest of its information systems.

Let's see: better performance, more control for the customer, and easier to use. Additionally, I'm willing to bet, though the case study doesn't discuss it in detail, that the Red Hat-based solutions also cost less than the proprietary alternatives NH Hoteles considered.

In a recessionary economy, CIOs must take a long, hard look at open-source solutions as NH Hoteles has. Better performance at lower cost sounds like a winning recipe for innovating and growing through a downturn. In other words, open source is a way for the CIO to turn IT into a profit center, rather than a cost center. That's called "job security" in this economy.