Today, Optaros and the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA) received the 2009 Red Hat Innovation Award in the JBoss Extensive Ecosystem Category.  The award recognizes our work with the MCCA on their custom, open source event management system.

The 3rd annual Red Hat Innovation Awards were given to 11 Red Hat customers and partners in six different categories for outstanding use, innovation and extension of Red Hat and JBoss solutions. It’s an honor to be included in this list of incredible companies and to have our work with the MCCA recognized.

The 11 winners are now eligible to win the community-voted JBoss Innovator of the Year and Red Hat Innovator of the Year awards.  Show your support for outstanding open source innovation by voting for your favorite (Optaros, perhaps?).

We worked with the MCCA last year to design and implement their (now award-winning!) event management system, ShowBiz.  By choosing open source, we were able to create for the MCCA a service oriented architecture (SOA)-based plug-in/plug-out framework.  This allows the MCCA’s own IT team to integrate other external services into it as needed going forward, giving the MCCCA the flexibility and scalability they were looking for. 

This solution has also streamlined the MCCA’s daily operations and increased employee productivity.  Across the board, personnel are focusing more on core aspects of the business over tactical work. They’ve also collect more than half a million dollars in outstanding account receivables, thanks to easier data access.  For more information about this event management solution, please read our case study.

We’d like to extend a special thank you to the MCCA for their forward thinking, trust in open source and wonderful partnership.  And of course, a big thank you as well to Red Hat and JBoss for this incredible honor.  Congratulations and good luck to all the other 2009 Red Hat Innovation Award recipients!