Linux vs Windows - Conquering a Windows Based World

IPZS, a joint-stock company with Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finance, is increasing its reliability and productivity by implementing an Enterprise SOA platform based on JBOSS along with Redhat support.  IPZS is responsible for printing and dissemination of the Italian Official Gazette, government publications, security and anti-counterfeiting systems, fine art publishing and ID documents, including traditional and electronic ID cards, passports and smart cards.

A quote from Maurizio Quattrociocchi, IT & Telecoms Director at IPZS.

“Migrating our systems to JBoss solutions was a strategic choice for us. It not only offers economic benefits, but also provides constant innovation and enhancements from the community that are key aspects for a company like ours that provides high-value services” 

The Italian Ministry of Economics has selected Redhat Linux to power its mission-critical applications because of its reliability and performance. They are running accounting packages for generating electronic and print payslips for more than 1.5 million state employees. Redhat is also being used to power their production Oracle and Mysql databases.

“It is using the system as the main platform for many of its critical applications, including its “Service Personale Tesoro” (SPT) application, which runs on one of the most popular Italian government websites.“

Their goal is to provide citizens with important public information via the internet.

Bahrain will be working with IBM and Gulf Business Machines (GBM) to unify its government’s infrastructure and provide services to its citizens using secure hardware, and software  platforms.  It will be based on Linux.

“Standards based technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for modernisation throughout society in our country. The pioneering vision of the Government of Bahrain is dedicated to ensuring that the Kindgom is at the forefront of developing technology and in driving services for our citizens with flexibility and accessibility to government services,” said Shaikh Ahmed Ateyatalla Al Khalifa, Undersecretary of the CIO.

The project will integrate several back-end systems and support the introduction of national card system that will give citizens access to information, services, and government facilities.

The largest state run pharmacy in Sweden has decided to replace its all if its existing IT infrastructure at its 900 pharmacies with Redhat Enterprise Linux on Intel servers. Because they deal with people’s health they wanted a system that they could really rely on. Isn’t that what we all want?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in combination with the new hardware, brings several advantages to Apoteket including low cost of ownership, solid performance and a large selection of software and open source alternatives that enhance development opportunities.

They must have forgot to read Microsoft’s “Get the Facts” campaign.

One of the largest food retailers in Scandinavia has made the switch and is standardizing its IT infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  A quote from Rolf Berge the production manger at Axfood.

 “Axfood has very high demands on availability and performance. We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it is a cost-efficient and safe platform for us to grow on.” 

The one word that caught my attention from the quote was “safe” .  It is different than the standard reasons of “cost-efficient”, “performance”, and “availability”.  We’re all used to hearing those.  “Safe” is how I feel when applications are running on Linux, “Safe” is how I feel about performance and uptime,   “Safe” is how I feel that an automatic update will not crash the machine.

Something amazing is occurring in Europe that I never thought would occur this quickly.  IE’s market share is dropping at an alarming rate.  Firefox has gained nearly 3.7 points over the last 4 months. Survey was conducted from July 2, 2007 to July 8, 2007.  Details covered at XtiMonitor. 

A large German Enterprise hosting company, ISP Host Europe, that works with more than 25% of enterprises listed on the German Dax has standardized on Redhat Linux.

“We saw a huge demand in the market for highly available web applications at a reasonable price,” said Patrick Pulvermüller, manager at Host Europe.

“The only way for us to satisfy this demand was to rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Other platforms suffered from definite weaknesses regarding pricing or service, some lacked in both respects,” he said.