Red Hat Software Chosen by FICO

Red Hat, Inc. announced that Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO), a predictive analytics and decision management software company, has deployed its software, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, Red Hat CloudForms, and Red Hat Ceph Storage, as the basis of its cloud infrastructure.

Moving to an OpenStack and Ceph-based cloud has not only helped FICO reduce time to market by 50% and lower costs by 30% compared to previous infrastructure implementations, but it has helped transform FICO into a Software-as-Service (SaaS) company, driving added sales to new and existing customers in expanded markets.

For more than 50 years, FICO has provided analytics software and tools used across multiple industries to manage risk, fight fraud, build more profitable customer relationships, optimize operations and meet strict government regulations. Many of FICO’s products reach industry-wide adoption including the FICO Score, the standard measure of credit worthiness in the US. The FICO Analytic Cloud gives application developers, business users, and FICO partners one-stop access to FICO’s analytics and decision management tools and technology, including SaaS applications for social and mobile customer engagement, marketing campaign development, account management, and credit decisions. The FICO Analytic cloud provides Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) access to the FICO Decision Management Platform, where customers use FICO analytic and decision tools and technology to create, customize, and deploy their applications and services.

As previously announced, FICO deployed OpenShift Enterprise, Red Hat’s private PaaS offering to build analytic applications and run them in its cloud architecture, reducing the time to value by up to 70% compared to its legacy software. With OpenShift Enterprise, FICO customers can create hybrid cloud solutions using the FICO Decision Management Platform and deploy those solutions both hosted and on-premises.

Building on the success of its collaboration with Red Hat, FICO looked to modernize its infrastructure to better position the company for future growth and enable swifter innovation. To achieve more flexibility and agility than offered through its legacy proprietary-based infrastructure, FICO evaluated several proprietary cloud solutions, leading it to choose OpenStack for its core infrastructure. After testing various OpenStack-based offerings, FICO chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, a scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Cisco Nexus Series Switches, finding the certified solution easier to implement. Cisco’s reference architecture on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and previous UCS deployment within FICO allowed for a smooth transition to the new infrastructure.

With datacenters running more than 10,000 containers and VMs around the world, managing its cloud environment was a top priority for FICO. To help achieve this, FICO replaced its proprietary software deployment with Red Hat CloudForms, an open management platform that provides orchestration, governance and policy-based control across hybrid clouds. CloudForms enables self-service provisioning and resource management, as well as quota enforcement, metering, and chargeback. With CloudForms, FICO developers are able to deploy their applications to any of FICO’s internal or external infrastructure platforms, giving them ‘single pane of glass’ management over their private and public clouds.

Additionally, FICO deployed Red Hat Ceph Storage for its enterprise distributed shared storage to support data volumes reaching into the PBs. Red Hat Ceph Storage, a scalable and open Software-Defined Storage (SDS) platform, offered the object storage capabilities that FICO was looking for and tight integration with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. FICO chose Red Hat Ceph Storage for its shared storage infrastructure because of its extensible and configurable architecture and features. Ultimately, this resulted in a 60% cost savings over its previous storage solution.

Tim Yeaton, SVP, infrastructure, Red Hat, said: “FICO is a banner example of a company that re factored not only its technology, but also its business model, to better compete in today’s competitive market. FICO understood early on that an open source cloud infrastructure based on OpenStack could enable more choice and foster innovation than its legacy, proprietary on-premises software. Red Hat has been thrilled to collaborate with FICO on this journey.“

Nick Gerasimatos, cloud development director, FICO, said: “With Red Hat’s OpenStack on Cisco UCS and Ceph, we’ve been able to create an elastic scalable infrastructure that delivers all of the benefits of cloud – speed of innovation, agility, the ability to deliver Software-as-a-Service – but with the ability to securely manage our resources in a private datacenter. This gives us the cloud platform we need to create FICO’s offerings, but with control of our data, workloads, compliance and security.“