By popular demand (page 1 of 5)

The company recently deployed a real-time point-of-sale application on Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server 3.0 and Oracle Application Server 10g to solve its supply chain problem.

Although EYS has 72 retail stores across Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, the lack of connectivity between its stores and production facilities resulted in continual overstock and understock situations, as well as a lack of visibility into the order-fulfillment process and current sales trends. With its Linux-based solution, EYS has cut inventory levels while increasing its sales-cycle visibility.

Euronext N.V.—Europe's first cross-border exchange, based in Amsterdam and the result of a merger of the Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam stock exchanges—is doing something completely different with Linux. Creating a competitive exchange to serve today's financial markets demands real-time data delivery and instant access to historical market data.

With more than 7,000 transactions per second, Euronext knew that it needed a high-end, near-real-time data warehouse that would reliably handle that kind of volume while maintaining excellent performance characteristics.

It achieved it with a combination of Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on two HP DL590 servers, an infrastructure that allows it to efficiently manage 6 terabytes of data while delivering near-real-time intelligence with 24-hour availability.

As the EYS and Euronext examples show, today's Linux deployments are less about testing the limits of open source software and trying out cool new technologies and more about delivering rock-solid enterprise value. And while Linux technology continues to mature with ultra-high-end capabilities traditionally found in proprietary UNIX systems, it's fast becoming the solid, cost-effective, reliably scalable choice for all types of companies.

More for Less with Linux
In today's bottom-line business environments, it's frequently hard to justify new IT expenditures. That's why EYS was pleasantly surprised when it was able to create an enterprise-class solution using an entry-level Intel-based server architecture.

"With Linux running on lower-end servers without compromising performance, we have lowered our overall IT investment significantly," says Albert Sim, MIS administrator of EYS. "NEC's Open Retail System running on Oracle's industry-leading database and application server on Linux has helped us achieve real-time sales-information availability; tighter security controls; optimized inventory levels; and most important, lower total cost of ownership."

The need for a tightly integrated retail and inventory system is critical to the smooth running, cost-effectiveness, and success of Eu Yan Sang, which ensures its long-standing reputation as being in the forefront of traditional Chinese medicine in the region.

Working closely with NEC Solutions Asia Pacific Pte Ltd., EYS deployed NEC's Open Retail System (ORS) across 18 of its 72 stores, going live in March 2004. Now, real-time sales accounting allows EYS to control inventory levels by historical trends, rather than having to rely on each store's "memory" of sales trends. In fact, EYS is on target to reduce its inventory from S$ (Singapore dollars) 5 million down to between S$3 million and S$3.5 million within one year.

But the system also consolidates orders from multiple retail outlets into one master pick list for factory fulfillment, significantly reducing the costs and time associated with filling orders.