Stan Mlynarczyk wrote:
> Can't speak to the apps but:
>
> Home Depot - thousands of LINUX licenses Burlington Coat Factory -
> Not sure but I think Point of Sale NASA - Would you trust a space
> mission to Windows? Neither does NASA. China - The officially
> sanctioned OS for China is (you guessed it!) Europe - Many
> companies in Europe are now using LINUX. Don't know specifics but
> I work for a fortune 500 company and my European counterparts tell
> me they are running into large numbers of companies that are now
> LINUX based" - perhaps some of our European friends can comment?
>
> I wish I had written down some of the many other instances of
> specific corporations that have adopted LINUX but the above are the
> ones that immediately come to mind.
Here are some more that are more well documented...
* Amerada Hess Corporation - Oil Exploration Supercomputing - Amerada
Hess Corp is a $7.4 billion petroleum company, but the supercomputers
traditionally used to analyze oil exploration data are rather costly
even for a company of this size. No longer a problem. Amerada Hess now
uses a large Linux cluster for the job. - Article -
* BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) - Light Rail Metropolitan Transit System
- This system tracks the flow of electricity from the high voltage DC
power lines of Pacific Gas and Electric to the distribution of
electricity via the third rail. If an emergency required the evacuation
of a train, this system would be used to turn off the electricity to
ensure the safety of passengers as they exited the system. - Article -
* Burlington Coat Factory - Entire Systems - Burlington Coat Factory is
a "Factory Outlet" retailer with 280 stores in 42 states. Initial Linux
installations at their new distribution center and a few new stores
proved highly successful, so roll-out to existing stores began. An order
for 1,250 Dell computers preloaded with Linux was placed to support the
effort.
The Linux systems are used to run warehousing and distribution, the gift
registry and back office functions such as ordering and general desktop.
The chosen office productivity suite is Applixware Office, which allows
a very high degree of customization. - Article -
* Conoco - Oil Exploration Supercomputing - Conoco is one of several
major petroleum companies that have chosen to use inexpensive Linux
clusters instead of costly supercomputers to analyze oil exploration
data. - Article -
* Cisco - Worldwide Printing System - Cisco, a $21 billion maker of
routers that tie the Internet together, signed a major agreement with
Microsoft regarding support for Active Directory. As part of that deal,
Cisco management declared Cisco an "all Microsoft" company.
Unfortunately, Cisco's IT staff couldn't get network printing services
to work right through NT servers (and you can't say Cisco engineers
don't understand networking, now, can you?). Cisco's worldwide printing
services now run on Linux.
* Digital Domain - Visual Effects Supercomputing - Digital Domain is a
major visual effects studio. In particular, they did the visual effects
for Appolo 13 and Titanic. The effects for Titanic were particularly
demanding, too demanding for their SGI Inigos, and would have normally
required a supercomputer costing millions. Digital Domain was able to do
the job on an inexpensive Linux cluster instead. - Article -
* Home Depot - Chain of 965 home improvement stores bringing in about
$35 billion per year. - Using Linux for receiving, inventory management,
store ordering and communications. This is a thin client based system,
completely eliminating the problems of PC maintenance. If a station
malfunctions, another is plugged in and it automatically downloads Linux
and other software from a server. Ready to go in a couple minutes. Cash
registers may be converted to Linux in the future. - Article -
* Just Sports USA - A fast growing chain (now 50 stores) selling sports
items - All Stores, Back Office functions, Inventory and eCommerce
systems run on Linux. All functions are integrated together using a
PostgreSQL database. The eCommerce system runs on Linux / Apache Web
servers and is also integrated with the inventory database. Postgre and
Apache are also Open Source products. - Article -
* Kaiser Aluminum - Manufacturing Control - Kaiser, one of the world's
largest producer of aluminum, aluminum sheet and foil, has chosen Linux
for many applications on the manufacturing floor. It works side by side
with Unix, Windows NT and specialty "real time" operating systems. -
Article -
* Largo Florida, City of - City office desktop systems. - Largo has
about 400 thin client workstations running the KDE 2 Desktop from a
Linux server. Currently most of the workload is on SCO Unix, AIX and
Windows NT servers, but all is bing migrated to Linux for a
multi-million dollar savings. Migration is already well under way and
should be complete by 2003. Using thin clients provides a low cost, very
low maintenance, uniform and easily administered computing environment
for all city users. At peak, there are about 230 simultaneous users. -
Article - Technical Article - Business Details -
* Lawson Inc. (Japan) - In-Store Consumer Web Ordering System - Lawson,
a giant convenience store chain (7,600 stores) in Japan, will be placing
two Linux based computers in each store to implement it's new Web
ordering system. The over 15,000 computers will be purchased from IBM
pre-configured with Linux installed. - Article - Article -
* Mexico City - government of - Everything! - The government of Mexico
City have concluded they can no longer justify the ever rising cost of
Microsoft Windows when the cost of Linux software is very low. Linux has
already proven itself in the city's motor vehicle licensing agency and
in the Mexican school system. Money saved will be used in social welfare
programs. - Article -
* Omaha Steaks - On-Line Commerce - Advertisements for this mail order
company can be found in the back of most up-scale home oriented
magazines. They were running their internal systems on an IBM AS/400 and
outsourced their Web site, but they wanted to tie the on-line ordering
directly into the AS/400. A cluster of Linux servers now runs the Web
site and connects to the AS/400. - Article -
* Raymour & Flanigan - Furniture Chain (50 stores in Northeast) - The
store chain has trnsferred most of its servers to Linux, and is
replacing Windows 98 PC with Linux based "thin client" workstations in
its service centers. Inventory and other databases are now being
migrated from Microsoft Access running on Windows servers to Oracle
running on Linux. - Article -
* Royal Dutch/Shell - Oil Exploration Supercomputing - One of the
world's largest petroleum companies, Royal Dutch/Shell could certainly
afford the supercomputers traditionally used to analyze oil exploration
data, but why do that when your competitors are using inexpensive Linux
clusters to do the job. Royal Dutch/Shell has decided to set up a bigger
Linux cluster than the ones it's competitors have. - Article -
* Tommy Hilfiger - Clothing Brand - Note: website designed by idiots
won't let you in at all without Flash plug-in. The company is installing
three Linux based portals running on IBM xSeries servers. The first
provides remote access to data on the company's IBM iSeries (AS/400)
datacenter computers. The second provides access for clothing
manufacturers to designs and specifications. The third provides B2B
eCommerce access to retailers and a company store for employees. Company
officials say the Linux systems provide the required performance at a
lower cost than any other platform. - Article -
* Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A. - Dealer Communications System - Toyota is
installing a Linux based system connecting all its car dealers to it's
factory. This is a Web based system from the ground up, and will be
handling 30 different functions including parts ordering, warranties,
sales transactions and repairs.
A 30 dealer pilot roll-out was highly successful, extremely reliable,
and easily maintained, so now the system will be rolled out to all 1,200
dealers. - Article -
* U.S. Postal Service - OCR Supercomputing - The Postal Service had
declared itself an "all Windows NT" house, but you can't use NT for what
it simply can't do - so they now sort all the bulk mail on over 900
Linux clusters scattered around the country (at less than half the cost
of the next cheapest solution (and that wasn't NT either)).
The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system uses scanners that were
already in place. The Linux system consists of 5 rack mounted PCs, one
to handle the scanners and sorting equipment, and 4 to share the
computational tasks.
* WesternGeco - Oil Exploration Supercomputing - IBM has built a Linux
based supercomputer for analysis of seismic data. This machine is built
from 256 IBM eServer xSeries. This is the second largest Linux cluster
IBM has built for oil exploration, the largest being the 1024 xSeries
cluster for Shell.
--
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
Linux - Choice of a GNU generation
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