2. 3
Recognitions Strategy 2016…
Company overview
Company
Service
portfolio
Supported
operating
systems
Partnerships
2001
Establishment and
incorporation of the
company in 2001
2008
Separation of Linbit IT
and Linbit HA
2016
Re-branding of Linbit IT
as LINFORGE
2003
First proprietary product:
„Linbox“, an out-of-the-box
all-round office server
2004 - today
Positioning around managed
services for open source
infrastructure
2006
Ubuntu
2003
• Suse partner
• Steel Eye
Lifekeeper partner
Increased focus on cloud
services
2014
• Comparex partner
• Quorum partner
• OpenFabNet / industry 4.0
2016
2004
First-time winner
of the newly introduced
open source category
Nominated as
best Austrian open source
consultant
2005 - 2014
Further extension of our
team by building new
talent internally
Expand in new growth fields
such as HPC, Cloud,
LINFORGE TAM, Appliance
products (i.e. LINSAN)
Maintain our lead in
Europe by continuously
investing in our employees
Extend our strong network of
partnerships by adding
complimentary positioned
competitors as sales catalysts
2001
Debian
2013
• Red Hat partner
• SEP partner
• Avnet partner
Red Hat
Suse
2013
Selection of key events
Expansion
2002
Acquisition of key client
PORR AG: Proof of concept for
open source Enterprise IT
Our partnership with Red
Hat kicked of a new level
of customer acquisition
2013
„LINFORGE must be named
as a widely acknowledged
lighthouse example –
reaching far beyond the
borders of the
OSS-community – for
Vienna’s position.”
(study “ICT-location Vienna”,
technopolis group 2012)
2015
Grow our reputation as
high-end go-to specialist
for open source into
Germany and Switzerland
2006
First customer in Germany,
WIWeoGis – a happy
customer until today
Austria’s most prestigious
consultancy and IT award
3. 4
Applying our deep industry expertise in the areas outlined above, our mission is to create professional Enterprise IT
Core service portfolio – “Peace of mind for your IT”
- RH1 Satellite 5 (Spacewalk)
- RH1 Satellite 6 (Katello)
- SUSE Manager (Spacewalk)
- OpsView
- CheckMK
- KVM
- RHV (oVirt)
- RH1 Cloudforms (ManageIQ)
- OpenNebula
- Openstack
- Puppet
- Ansible
Cloud
management
Configuration
management
System
management
Virtualization Monitoring
TAM1
- Admin, custom-tailored
- Technically separated
Note: 1) Red Hat 2) Technical Account Management – for the entire spectrum of Linux distributions
4. 5
Our team’s competencies
After many years of offering a very broad service portfolio, LINFORGE is now positioned to leverage on its team’s core skills
Note: Skills mentioned on this slide indicate that (at least one) of LINFORGE’s employees has knowledge on expert level. Skills in (brackets) indicate less specialized, basic skills .
Storage
Red Hat Storage Server, Gluster, Storage Planning w/
RAID, LVM, Filesystem; SAMBA, NFS, iSCSI, (Ceph)
Networking
Advanced Networking and Routing IPv4/IPv6,
Traffic Shaping, VPN, VLANS, HP/Cisco
Switches, FiberChannel, Infiniband
Backup
SEP Sesam, DRBD Proxy, Bacula, rsync
Operating Systems
Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu,
Debian, Oracle Linux,
Scientific Linux, CentOS,
Fedora, Univention UCS
Cloud
Red Hat Enterprise
Linux Openstack
Platform, SUSE
Cloud, Red Hat
CloudForms, RDO,
OpenNebula
High Availability
Pacemaker Cluster Manager w/ Heartbeat/
Corosync; Red Hat Cluster Suite, SUSE HA
Extension, DRBD
Virtualization
Red Hat Virtualization, Linux
KVM, (VMWare), oVirt,
VirtualBox, (Citrix Xen)
Containerization
Docker, OpenVZ, (LXC)
Systems Management
Red Hat Satellite 5.x/6.x, SUSE Manager, Spacewalk, Katello
Configuration Management / Provisioning
Puppet, Foreman, Ansible, csync2, (Pulp)
Monitoring
CheckMK, OpsView,
Icinga, Nagios, ntop
Network Monitoring
Applications
Webserver: Apache, nginx,
(Tomcat), E-Mail: Zimbra,
Postfix, Sendmail, Dovecot,
Courier, (Zarafa),
Squirrelmail, Roundcube,
Cloud: owncloud, nexcloud,
Other: Asterisk, DNS bind
Firewall
Linux Netfilter Firewall, Red Hat Firewall, Firehol
Security
IPSec, OpenVPN, Encryption: OpenSSL, PGP, S/MIME,
x509 Certificate/CA Management; SELinux, TOR
Databases
MySQL, MariaDB, SkySQL, PostgreSQL,
(Oracle, Ingres, MongoDB, IBM DB2)
Performance Tuning
Linux Kernel, Database,
Webserver, Mailserver, Storage
Complimentary ExtendedCore
Directory Services
OpenLDAP, Red Hat IPA,
eDirectory Server
Communication
IRC, Jabber/Openfire,
(Empathy, Pidgin)
Development
Interpreter Languages: Bash,
Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP;
Compiler Languages: C, C++
Loadbalancer
Linux Virtual Server, HA
Proxy, (Pen)
5. 6
Technical Sales
LINFORGE’s employees are Europe’s highest-certified team of Linux-distributors
7x Red Hat Certified Engineer
7x Red Hat Certified System Administrator
5x Red Hat Certified Virtualization Administrator
4x Red Hat Certified Datacenter Specialist
3x Red Hat Certified System Administrator in Red Hat OpenStack
4x Red Hat Delivery Specialist - Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
1x Red Hat Delivery Specialist – Infrastructure-as-a-Service (PaaS)
1x Red Hat Delivery Specialist - RHEL 7 Troubleshooting
7x Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Deployment and Systems Management
4x Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Clustering and Storage Management
2x Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Directory Services and Authentication
4x Red Hat Sales Engineer Specialist – Cloud Management
4x Red Hat Sales Specialist – Middleware Application Development
3x Red Hat Sales Specialist – Platform
3x Red Hat Sales Specialist – Virtualization
2x Platform: Partner Certified Salesperson
2x Virtualization: Partner Certified Salesperson
1x Red Hat Sales Engineer Specialist – Platform Migration
1x Red Hat Sales Specialist – Cloud Management
5x Novell Certified Linux Professional 11 2x Certified SUSE Salesperson
2x SEP sesam Basic Administrator Version 4.0
1x SteelEye LifeKeeper for Linux
Note: #x...number of certified LINFORGE employees per category
Certifications (company level)
We are officially entitled to provide CheckMK trainings in Austria
6. 8
Felder Group
Company background
- Wood working machinery; sold in 72 countries; 400 employees headquartered in
Hall in Tirol, Austria + 200 sales centers
Problem
- Felder’s virtualization has been running on a "VMware vShpere Essentials“
license, a very popular solution amongst SMEs, with the bottleneck of allowing
only 3 ESXi Hypervisor Hosts
- Upgrade to "VMware vSphere Advanced“ very costly
Solution
- With "Red Hat Virtualization" (former "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization") a cost-
efficient solution was found, which scales independently of the number of
deployed Hypervisors
- The solution is operated via a web surface provided by "Red Hat Virtualization
Manager" that runs on a multitude of client operation systems and has been
made highly available by applying LINFORGE’s sister company’s data
replication software DRBD. (LINBIT1)
Virtualization
PORR AG
IP-Networks
Company background
- Leading Central, Eastern & South-Eastern European construction company,
based out of AUT; 13,000 employees, revenues of around EUR 3.5 bn (2015)
Problem
- PORR has been searching for an alternative for its relatively expensive Frame
Relay lines to its international construction sites
- The solution must be stable, safe (i.e. tap-proof), cost-efficient and flexible in
terms of connectivity
Solution(s) (since 2002 with already 4 projects and 3 hardware generations)
- Project 1_Site Networking via VPN-IPSEC-Tunnel: starting in 2002 with a POC
in Poland and the HQ in Vienna, by now grown to a system of 130 locations,
connected via a “full-mesh” VPN tunnel
- Project 2_Clientless VPN/SSL VPN: 2004 ( - long before it became available off-
the-shelf) access to the company‘s intranet via a HTTPS-enabled web browser,
authentication with RSA-key-Fobs
- Project 3_OpenVPN: Provision of a self-service application for employees to
install OpenVPN client and gain access to the company‘s network services (also
non HTTP/HTTPS), inclusive of a security policy
- Project 4_Highly available internet connection (BGP) for the HQ
Source: Company information 1) www.linbit.com
Result
- Independency of hardware- and software suppliers / zero license fees
- Costs reduced by more than 40% compared to a proprietary solution
- Scalable solution
- Enormous value from high availability
Result
- Cost savings of ~80% compared to previously planed solution
- Scalable solution, 130 sites connected redundant and highly available to HQ
Customer success stories
7. 9
emarsys eMarketing Systems AG
Company background
- Marketing automation software for retail and e-commerce; serving > 1,500 clients in over
140 countries; headquartered in AUT with > 550 employees in 15 offices
Problem
- Two historically grown, monolithic, central databases were hindering the
implementation of urgently needed features for emarsys’ platform and repeatedly
caused issues for daily ops and maintenance
- Expectations on the new solution: 1.) Strict separation of static master- and dynamic
application data 2.) scalability 3.) improved performance and increased reliability in day-to-
day ops, backup and restore options 4.) minimization of required adaptions on platform
applications 5.) high availability and data redundancy 6.) no downtime
Solution
- 1.) Replacing DAS-based DB+backup by high-end server with local HDD storage for OS
and backup, plus local PCIe-SSD storage for DB 2.) High availability & data
redundancy realized with a DB-proprietary streaming replication mechanism of one
master onto several slaves 3.) backup implemented in the same form, with one VM on the
DB server itself and another on the disaster recovery knot – not needing an own DB
authority in day-to-day ops 4.) filesystem with integrated snapshot functionality
5.) dynamic application data stored in new structure based on dedicated instances
Managed services
Salinen Austria AG
Storage area networks
Company background
- Salt producer, based in Austria with subsidiaries throughout CEE; generating revenues >
EUR 100 mn with 470 employees
Problem
- Servers installed at two different sites, located about 12 miles apart from each other.
Annual increase in data volume of 30 percent – the storage capacity of the company’s
IT infrastructure needed an extension
- Storage area networks are quite expensive due to the cost intensive special server and
switch components as well as the fiber glass cables required
Solution (“It doesn’t always have to be a SAN”)
- LINFORGE developed a cost effective alternative , an IP-based iSCSI storage area
network that allows using COTS hardware and conventional Ethernet
Source: Company information
Result
- LINFORGE equipped a start-up with the scalable IT needed to expand globally –
since then emarsys grew from 6 to 208 hosts (and further sticks to LINFORGE)
- LINFORGE is the only open source provider that offers 24 x 7 on-call service –
emarsys can focus on its core business and let LINFORGE deal with the rest
Result
- “An attractive alternative at a tenth of the cost” (Head of IT, Salinen Austria AG)
- LINFORGE’s iSCSI storage area network allows maintenance and upgrade
activities during operation
Customer success stories
Problem
- Nagios monitoring in place; wish for a solution that 1.) can be easily operated via an
interface and 2.) identifies autonomously the prevalent hardware monitoring checks
Solution
- The monitoring system CheckMK , that exactly meets the customer’s needs, was
implemented. The solution supports features that outperform conventional m. systems
Monitoring system
8. 10
Solution
- Consolidation of different operating systems onto Red Hat Enterprise
Linux (RHEL), Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV)
- Red Hat Satellite Server, to simplify automation processes
- A Standard Operating Environment (SOE) was defined and prepared
to be rolled out fast and often
- In total, 200 virtual machines were consolidated and are now
centrally managed:
o 80x vServer Microsoft (XP – MS Server 2008)
o 80x vServer CentOS
o 40x other virtualized Linux distributions
- ZID’s technicians were trained by LINFORGE in several workshops:
o Red Hat Satellite: Installation workshop
o Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization: Installation of two virtualization
environments (different SLAs)
o Monitoring: Installation workshop CheckMK plus mini-intro
University of Innsbruck – ZID (Zentraler Informatikdienst)
Customer background
- Central IT Service unit with a staff of 100 employees for all faculties, employees and students of the University of Innsbruck
- Serving research and development, teaching and continuing professional education; > 28,000 students and university staff > 4,600
Red Hat Satellite Server
Source: University website, LINFORGE OPEX estimate
Customer success stories
As a consequence of LINFORGE’s project, the University of Innsbruck switched off its entire VMWare environment and is now completely open-source run
Problem
- The University of Innsbruck made it a
strategic goal to become
independent from conventional
software vendors and benefit from
cost savings provided by Open-Source
- Also its high standards and
requirements on scientific IT
applications and security raised the
wish for a Open-Source solution
- The central requirement was a
management software that is able to
set up and update various predefined
server configurations, thereby
reducing manual efforts drastically
- They requested support in Unix2Linux
Migration
Result
- The Red Hat Satellite Server enables us to
comfortably and reliably make the required
updates on the multitude of systems we use.
We are now in the position to make the system
updates with significantly reduced OPEX.”
(Dr. Dirk Draheim, Head of ZID)
VMWare
vCenter Server,
40 Sockets
vs.
RHEV
RHEV-Manager,
20 hypervisors
1st year € 157,642.- € 15,960.-
following years € 27,347.- € 15,960.-
UNIX
48 systems
vs.
RHEL
per year € 114,816.- € 37,180.-
OPEX
estimate
9. 11
emarsys eMarketing Systems AG
Customer background
- Marketing automation software for retail and e-commerce
- Serving > 1,500 clients in over 140 countries; headquartered in AUT with > 550 employees in 15 offices
IT infrastructure growth
Source: Company website
Customer success stories
Problem
- With Emarsys’ exponential
company growth over the years,
not only the number of active
users but also the functionality and
requirements on the underlying IT
infrastructure repeatedly
expanded into new spheres
- Emarsys needed a true expert in
terms of
o hardware,
o operating system,
o network,
o monitoring and
o security
Solution
- Over the past 14 years, LINFORGE brought what has been one data center consisting of a few
servers and network components, to a 3-digit number of physical- and virtual servers,
spread across 4 separated data centers:
- Transition of technologies (next to up- and running operations) – e.g.:
o from Cisco PIX Firewall to Linux Netfilter HA-Cluster, and later on from PA to PI with
BGP4
o from Debian GNU/Linux to Red Hat Linux and now to CentOS
o database migration (see previous case study included in company pres.)
- High availability and disaster recovery storage solution : DRBD; from data center no.1
initially, to DRBD-proxy across all data centers
- Large-scale application of systems management, configuration management systems and
virtualization on server clusters
- 24 x 7 on-call service – Emarsys can focus on its core business
Result
- Many of LINFORGE’s services
influenced Emarsys’ user
experience directly
- The impact LINFORGE made,
spans across a horizon of
multiple technology lifecycles
and is reflected in various
dimensions, e.g.:
o from 6 to 208 hosts
o DB size: from a few GB to 1.5
TB
o Network topology: from a few
10/100MB switches to
redundant GB switches to 10
GB backbone infrastructure in 2
data centers
LINFORGE contributes IT performance, reliability and security to Emarsys’ success story – from start-up to the multinational e-commerce marketing leader it is today
20162002
10. 12
Partner network
o We have a strong reputation in our fields of expertise. Our partners know about our
open-source strength and name us as the go-to specialist in terms of high-end
open-source
o In an increasingly complex ecosystem, we seek to partner with complimentary
positioned competitors and win them as sales catalysts (and vice versa)
Word of mouth
o Recommendations from the existing customer base, to contact LINFORGE in
order to get the best open-source solution
o LINFORGE’s strongest sales channel – the majority of LINFORGE’s customers
are acquired via recommendations
LINFORGE Technical Account Management (TAM)
o Known from our LINFORGE TAM service offer as an efficient partner, a lot of our
customers come back to us when it is time for larger IT projects
Sales channels & customers
A major factor for its constantly increasing customer base is LINFORGE’s ability to consistently exceed customer expectations
Example:
Direct
o Congresses
o Our own events
o Press releases
o Network (i.e. OpenFabNet)
Example
customer:
Example
customer:
Example
partner/
customer:
Sales channels Selected examples
“Once we have a
customer on board and
we had the chance to
prove our value, we are
asked to stay…
…the major part of our
revenues comes from
upselling, which
happens naturally as our
performance is
extraordinary.”
11. 13
Company
Service
portfolio
Certifications
Partnerships
Rebranding
Capitalize on clear company positioning
as specialist IT consulter in targeted
marketing initiatives
Strategy 2016 onwards…
Expansion
Key initiatives
Further extension of our
team by building new
talent internally
Expand in new growth
fields such as HPC, Cloud,
Linforge TAM, Appliance
products (i.e. LINSAN)
Maintain our lead in
Europe by continuously
investing in our employees
Extend our strong network of
partnerships by adding
complimentary positioned
competitors as sales catalysts
Grow our reputation as
high-end go-to specialist
for open source into
Germany and Switzerland
Technical staff
Increase our team of industry experts by
building three new talents internally
Sales staff
Hire one additional sales manager and
intensify our business development and
marketing efforts
HPC storage
Through our partnership with BeeGFS we
are prepared to enter the HP storage
segment
CloudForms
The demand on the market is larger than
the supply of know-how on the subject - we
are positioned to capitalize on that need
Technical Account Management
We sense a strong demand for expert
knowledge across the entire Linux
spectrum that we cater to with our TAM offer
Market knowledge
Our deep industry expertise allows us to
anticipate the next big thing on time
– we start to acquire new knowledge early
External training
We maintain our position as high-end open
source specialist by consistently investing
in our people’s education
Apprenticeship approach
Both, “old” & new knowledge circulates
within our team, which helps us to build &
maintain a broad knowledge base
Further expansion
Our reputation as specialists helps us to
constantly increase our strong partner
network
Turn competition into partners
In the overflowing OSS universe we build
alliances with former competition that
complement our portfolio (and vice versa)
OS Business
Funnel new approaches on OS from our
large network of thought leaders into new
products – and grow together
Marketing
Consequently target opportunities in
Germany and Switzerland with our new
brand name
Industry 4.0
Approach a new segment of customers that
needs to react on the omnipresent mega
trend with a compelling offer
Spread geographically
Extend our team of sales staff and
technicians throughout the DACH region
Strategy and roadmap
12. 14
Contact details
LINFORGE Technologies GmbH
Vivenotgasse 48
1120 Vienna
Austria
Manfred Ostermann
Head of Sales & Marketing
LINFORGE | Peace of mind for your IT
E: manfred.ostermann@linforge.com
T: +43 1 817 82 92 54
Clemens Niederreiter
Chief Operating Officer
LINFORGE | Peace of mind for your IT
E: clemens.niederreiter@linforge.com
T: +43 1 817 82 92 53
