Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare has begun the work of replacing its proprietary platform to an open one. The goal is to create a modern IT environment across the 22-hospital systems, which also includes 180 clinics and 1,500 physicians.

Intermountain is using Red Hat platforms to transform its existing infrastructure by replacing legacy tools and migrating services from a proprietary platform to an open source Red Hat stack.

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As Intermountain executives see it, by moving toward a more streamlined and modern IT environment, Intermountain gains enterprise-wide IT automation and on-demand services and it also reduces complexity.

As part of the Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure suite of integrated solutions, Intermountain implemented Red Hat Virtualization to increase scalability of its infrastructure, increase cross-platform capabilities, boost performance and also to help provide return on investment faster than other proprietary solutions.

"As we look to the future, it was imperative that we be able to bring IT automation to all aspects of our business, and that our infrastructure was flexible enough to do so,” Bret Lawson, director, Infrastructure & Operations, Intermountain Healthcare, said in a statement. “After many considerations, an open-source environment was the best option to support our needs, and help streamline operations and reduce costs,”

Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat brings together open source components for the Linux operating systems.

The Red Hat implementation helps address Intermountain’s needs from both a cost and operational perspective, including its management of both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows environments, said Lawson.

“Intermountain Healthcare is an excellent example of an enterprise automating its IT operations and embracing innovative, open source solutions,” Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, Management, Red Hat, said in a statement.

Fitzgerald added that an increasing number of organizations are transitioning to open source technologies to help deliver new services and also to reduce cost.

Red Hat Consulting assisted Intermountain nearly every step of the way, he added, from development of the initial proof-of-concept to the end-state architecture

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