Ecuador’s Internal Revenue Service Selects Red Hat Solutions
Open source solutions Red Hat announced that Ecuador’s Internal Revenue Service, SRI Ecuador, has developed a stable and secure platform for its Internet-based tax return project using a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.
SRI said it supplies economic activity to individual and government taxpayers throughout the country’s 24 provinces. It services over one million customers, maintains a workforce of 2,400 and recorded an annual income of over USD 5 billion in 2007. SRI services include registered tax services, reception of tax returns, authorization of sales receipts, and claim handling for taxpayers. It also conducts tax collection and information supply for the federal government.
SRI said it first began using Red Hat solutions in 1999 when it implemented Red Hat Linux 6 for a variety of internal projects. It required a reliable solution, and turned to Red Hat solutions for freedom from licensing costs. In 2002, SRI decided to pilot an Internet-based tax return project aimed to encourage taxpayers to submit their tax returns online instead in-person at an SRI office.
To develop the project, SRI needed a technology solution that could offer a stable and secure platform. After experiencing success with its initial implementation of Red Hat Linux, SRI investigated Red Hat solutions for its tax return project.
With the combination of Red Hat Linux and JBoss Application Server, SRI’s Internet tax return system was implemented as a pilot project by the end of 2002. The project introduced the Internet as an interaction platform with SRI taxpayers for the first time, and also marked the first open source project to be implemented by the Ecuadorian government.
Since the start of the project, Red Hat has been used as the operating system of choice for the internal application servers and has been updated with the availability of each new version of the solution. Currently, SRI utilizes Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.
Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is used on 90 percent of SRI’s HP Blade servers with dual-core AMD processors and quad-core Intel processors on a 64-bit architecture. It supports over 60 Intranet applications and 16 Internet applications, and approximately 95 percent of SRI’s employees rely on Red Hat solutions daily to execute their job. Utilizing only two administrators, the organization runs 30 applications on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, with over 80 percent of the applications leveraging the solution’s high-availability features. In comparison to competitive alternatives, the JBoss solution allows for reduced memory footprint and CPU workload, the groups noted in a release.