The Company migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from AIX to realize significant performance gains as well as centralized, secure management through Red Hat Network. Union Bank is also piloting JBoss as well as MySQL and plans to make Red Hat's complete solution stack part of its core technology direction.

Union Bank is more than 130 years old and one of the 25 largest commercial banks in the nation based on assets. The bank has 320 branch offices in California, Washington and Oregon. "Our mission is to provide the best customer experience. Open source technology plays a major role in the customer-facing sales and service product line," said Mok Choe, CTO, Union Bank of California. "We are constantly looking for opportunities to offer higher reliability and speed in a cost-effective manner. We are re-architecting our web environment to scale horizontally using the commodity hardware and open source tools."

The criteria for Union Bank's platform selection included cost, reliability, scalability, security, provisioning, configuration management, the available talent pool and what it believed to be the future direction of the software space. Red Hat was able to meet all of the requirements, and in just nine months UBOC built solutions running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite and MySQL.

"We believe we will significantly reduce the cost per transaction by utilizing the commodity hardware and open source tools, which will finance further customer experience improvement," said Choe.