Johannesburg, 01 Aug 2006
Corporate South Africa is making more informed decisions around investment in Linux infrastructure. The focus is now on more than just the financial commitment and evaluation is based on genuine understanding, appreciation of the measurable benefits and business value that Linux can deliver.
Benefits such as increased stability, further control, greater flexibility and higher degrees of customisation are all helping to elevate the reputation of Linux as a credible, effective and strategic operating system.
Boardroom discussions now tend to lean more towards the values of Linux and what it can offer, rather than the price tag alone. This increased understanding around Linux is helping to drive up the rate of adoption.
There are a number of examples of how enterprises have engaged with partners to install and run Linux systems to the betterment of the business.
One such example is that of Benefit Recovery Services (BRS), a local provider of identification and recovery services for the benefit of pension and provident fund trustees.
BRS is owned by a consortium of shareholders and was established to identify and recover unclaimed monies that lie in financial service companies, find untraced beneficiaries to ensure appropriate distribution and assist pension and provident fund trustees, fund administrators and former members in implementing the requirements and principles of the Pension Funds Second Amendment Act, 2001.
The company decided to implement the Asterisk solution to enhance its call centre operation.
BRS operates two call centres, one to log and follow up on incoming calls and the other to manage external or outgoing calls. Management invested in Synaq's customised kick-start CD called ShrinkWrap that automatically configured each terminal at the 60-seat call centre with a custom Linux installation providing each agent with only the necessary tools and eliminating the need for human intervention.
The company's back-end was started in SQL and has remained so in order to effectively manage its database of approximately 7.5 million individuals.
In the natural development of the company, BRS soon realised that its incoming or registration call centre, viewed very much in the light of a 'step child' to the company and non-core entity, was actually a very important division that could not be ignored.
BRS management understood the potential in Asterisk and its ideal placement as a VOIP switch.
Another example of how Linux has influenced business is in the case of Regent Insurance Company Ltd, a provider of underwrite services for motor and motor-related businesses. The company implemented an Intel/Linux-based solution and acquired related services to guarantee optimum performance from its communications infrastructure.
The decision was made to migrate its central database application, which runs on Oracle 8, from a Sun architecture to a Linux architecture.
The client experienced significant growth and the main server began to take strain when its 190 or so agents simultaneously logged into the solution. An upgrade on the server would have been costly and so Regent evaluated the solution on a Microsoft environment using Intel architecture. Although the solution increased performance, bottlenecks still occurred.
Regent then opted to evaluate the solution on Linux but had difficulty in sourcing a vendor that could successfully install Oracle 8.17 on Red Hat Linux (RHEL AS2.1).
The cost saving element was associated with not having to upgrade Sun servers and also allow Regent Insurance the ability to scale its environment and apply readily available Intel/Linux architecture to accommodate new customers.
A major challenge lay in marrying an old version of Oracle (Oracle 8.17) with an older version of Red Hat Linux (RHEL AS2.1).
Low level debugging and diagnostics was conducted in order to come up with the solution. The primary requirement of ensuring that Oracle 8 worked natively on Linux in conjunction with Regent Insurance's in-house insurance software application, was fulfilled.
Regent has also decided to migrate the entire solution to Linux running with Oracle 10g. It will also install RHEL AS4.0 and Oracle 10g. This will definitely result in even greater performance and will provide us with greater flexibility to expand.
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