Enterprises around the world are putting Oracle on Linux to work (page 1 of 3)

From e-government projects to industrial companies from Australia to the USA. Oracle continues to play a major role in helping organizations realize the massive savings with Oracle software on Linux.

E-Government in Australia
"We run five operating systems—everything from Linux to NT to Solaris to NetWare—and Linux has probably been more stable than the other four." Mike Kennedy - CIO for the New South Wales Office of State Revenue.

As CIO for the New South Wales Office of State Revenue (OSR), Mike Kennedy is responsible for the IT systems that monitor and collect taxes, for example on regulated transactions such as land purchases, security and stock sales, and duties on goods sold.

Over the past three years the OSR has been able to automate 30 percent of its business duties by using Oracle9i Application Server running on Linux for its e-commerce implementation. The OSR has also lowered its cost for collecting money to less than 6 cents per AUS$100, which is the most efficient of all state offices.

Transaction times have also been cut to less than 10 seconds for approximately 96 percent of its transactions.

Perhaps it's the heady feeling of handling all that money that makes one bold, but when the OSR decided to migrate to Linux, it didn't waste any time doing departmental or pilot applications. "We went straight in for a core business application that's critical to our business—e-commerce—and now Oracle9iAS is supporting the system that collects AUS$11 billion," says Kennedy. "We're not just stomping around on the edges."

With the new system, e-commerce transactions have gone from zero to 30 percent in two years and have doubled in the last six months. Originally OSR was running its Oracle8i database and some PHP on Linux, and then about two years ago it installed the Oracle9i Application Server running on Linux, along with J2EE programs and XML e-commerce connections.

It's all been remarkably stable. "We've been running all that Web infrastructure very successfully," says Kennedy. "We run five operating systems—everything from Linux to NT to Solaris to NetWare—and Linux has probably been more stable than the other four." And, OSR is currently implementing Oracle9i RAC on Red Hat Linux to further improve the reliability of its services.

Not only has moving to Linux dramatically cut the OSR's processing time and cost, but it's also a considerably cheaper platform than traditional alternatives. "The capital cost savings are significant. The big capital item is the hardware itself, and the ability to buy Dell boxes or any old Intel boxes compared to buying high-end UNIX boxes is the real benefit," says Kennedy. "They're basically about a quarter of the price."

A Medical Center in USA
"With Red Hat and Oracle's initiative with Unbreakable Linux, we don't have to purchase more expensive hardware, we can just plug in more boxes with Oracle9i RAC. Because of Oracle's clustering technology, it made a great deal of sense to us that Linux was probably the way to go for scalability." Alan Wamser, a systems analyst at HMC.

You might not expect doctors to be the target market for Linux, but Hays Medical Center (HMC), in Hays, Kansas, does. That's because HMC has recently migrated a series of applications from its IBM AS/400, Lotus Notes, and Windows systems to Oracle products running on Linux. "We want the system to be an integral part of everyone's daily life," says Alan Wamser, a systems analyst at HMC.