Daman looks to cut costs, improve application stability with Red Hat

Red Hat today announced that Daman, the UAE’s first specialised national health insurance company, has migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating platform.

The move intends to significantly reduce operational costs, improve stability and reliability and simplify management of its enterprise content management applications.

Daman handles more than 1.4 million medical claims each month, a tremendous number of requests on its underlying systems with an estimated 20 million IT related transactions daily to increase efficiency, improve control of information, and reduce the overall cost of information management.

Daman opted for an enterprise content management application, which was deployed on a proprietary operating system. However, as the system did not integrate well with the rest of its open source IT infrastructure, the company decided to migrate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“We prefer to opt for open source technology whenever possible and applicable. So, when undertaking new IT initiatives we evaluate the solutions which best align with this long-term IT strategy,” said Ramzi Rahal, Director of IT at Daman.

The migration was fast and efficient, with little impact on regular business operations. In addition to the significant reduction in the system’s operational costs, Daman experienced a number of benefits from the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These include the standardisation of systems in accordance with the organisation’s long-term IT vision, ease of maintenance, and excellent stability and robustness even when dealing with large volumes of requests.

Since its establishment in the region, Daman has been a strong advocate of open source technology and has invested heavily in developing the necessary skill sets to carry out complex implementations and maintenance of such systems within the organisation itself.

“The platform running the enterprise content management system clearly did not fit well with the rest of our IT infrastructure, so we decided to migrate this component to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

Rahal is particularly proud of the in-house expertise that has been developed for the integration of Red Hat solutions, stating: “The entire implementation was carried out by our own internal team and they managed it without facing any issues. This is a testament to both the skill of our engineers as well as the ease of manageability of Red Hat’s products. Even the day-to-day maintenance of these systems is easily carried out by our technical team, allowing us to run our applications with a high degree of confidence.”

The company plans to continue its collaboration with Red Hat and is currently in the process of web deployment of its core insurance application with its application servers running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The aim is to improve process efficiency within the organisation.