One of the world’s leading providers of open source solutions, Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), has announced that the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), one of the world’s leading financial market exchanges and the first major financial market open every day, has successfully migrated mission-critical legacy applications to Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP).
ASX first deployed JBoss EAP in 2011 as part of a Red Hat Global Services implementation aimed at modernising legacy technologies and using JBoss EAP to increase reliability, speed to market, and facilitate the introduction of customer-centric web applications. In pursuit of the company’s goal to become the world’s most respected financial marketplace, ASX knew it needed to upgrade to more stable, consistently performing, cost-effective applications.
After the initial ASX Online Company migration to JBoss EAP in 2012 yielded a go-live environment that was robust and stable, with lower server support costs and more time for developers to focus on innovation, ASX used JBoss EAP to build the ASX.com backing API and the Sharemarket Game, which currently accommodates more than 20,000 players.
Commenting on this successful migration Theresa Payne, senior manager, Web Development and Support, ASX, said, “Red Hat’s focus on building transformational, next-generation technologies made it a clear-cut decision for us to deploy Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for our mission-critical applications. With Red Hat, we get the training, support and technical expertise necessary to help keep our applications – especially those that brokers interact with every day to report the markets – running smoothly, and provide a great user experience for our website visitors.”
ASX is a high-traffic site and JBoss EAP helps deliver improved user experience and website performance with greater back-end stability. ASX now runs critical B2B applications on Red Hat, including the ASX Online, which is at the centre of Australia’s capital market, as it is a regulatory requirement for all financial market participants. Every day, key stakeholders are using it to update prices, issue company announcements and deliver critical reporting to the market.
As a public service, ASX faces intense regulatory and compliance scrutiny. If the company’s websites and web properties are down or unavailable, the general public may mistakenly assume that the market is down as well. JBoss EAP delivers more consistent stability, uptime, performance and flexible functionality. Other benefits observed with Red Hat include:
- ASX’s website and application reboot times are 60 times faster than with the legacy application, enabling quicker recovery to minimise associated risk
- The ability to have self-healing applications: no manual intervention required to re-establish database connectivity for applications when lost
- On-site training from Red Hat Enterprise Linux certified trainers, quick response time for customer services requests
- Cost-effective platform cut operating costs in half
- Automated platforms free up developers’ time from the day-to-day maintenance tasks to focus on innovation
- Increased security and stability to function in a highly regulated industry, with reduced downtime
- Consistent and frequent automatic updates, avoiding disruption to user workflows
Mike Piech, vice president and general manager, Middleware, Red Hat concluded, “Financial services organisations building next-generation applications require not just rock-solid reliability and robust security features but also the ability to change with lightning speed. This unique combination of dependability and agility has long been a hallmark of Red Hat JBoss Middleware, and we are delighted to see it employed by ASX in this critical role for the Australian financial market.”
