Red Hat announced that Behr has migrated its Website from IBM WebSphere to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform in an effort to reduce total cost of ownership, increase reliability, eliminate vendor lock-in and accelerate its development lifecycle.

The Behr.com Website is an important marketing tool for the company and was the centerpiece of a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign in 2007. With approximately 450,000 visitors per month and projected continuing growth, the Behr IT developers began to consider alternative technologies to meet the site's complex demands.

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform offered Behr a trusted, standards-compliant solution that provided freedom from vendor lock-in and additional benefits not available through WebSphere.

"Basically, our developers wanted to move away from WebSphere, so they specifically asked us if we could get our Web site up and running on JBoss without too much trouble," said Eric Stevenson, web administrator at Behr. "Another concern that the development team had about WebSphere was that the development lifecycle was too long. The process of deploying stop/deploy/start test loops to the IBM platform could take 30 minutes or longer. Because multiple web developers needed to complete multiple cycles per day, the hours of lost productivity were significant."

As the migration project began, Behr used the free JBoss.org Application Server project for testing and after successful results, purchased a subscription to the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Today, Behr utilizes JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux throughout its Web infrastructure, composed of five application servers, three web servers and two database servers in its virtualized cluster of production Sun machines. An identical environment is maintained for QA cycles.

Since migrating to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Behr has experienced enhanced performance, reduced TCO and simplified system administration. "The nice thing about open source is that it's open, it's consistent and you know it's going to work," said Stevenson. "Testing time has been slashed from 30 minutes per cycle to just eight minutes. Response time for visitors of the Web site has dramatically improved, making for a better customer experience. With WebSphere, you had about six different processes to complete, and then you crossed your fingers and hoped it would work. JBoss practically installs itself."

For the future, Behr plans to expand its use of JBoss solutions. In addition to continuing to migrate WebSphere application servers over to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Behr is currently working on the proof of concept for moving to the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and expects the project to begin soon.

"With JBoss, everything about managing and supporting our application is simple and straightforward," said Stevenson. "Cost, time, complexity - everything related to administration has decreased. JBoss just works. That's the bottom line for us."

For more information on JBoss contact John Terrill, jterrill@speakerboxpr.com at SpeakerBox Communications.