"Country Energy, one of the largest providers of electrical power in Australia, is a good example of a public sector company that has taken Linux seriously. The company, which has annual revenues of about $1 billion a year, operates more than 200,000 miles of power lines, serving the needs of about 750,000 customers in five states or territories. Some of the more famous customers include the Sydney Opera House, Melbourne's Rialto Towers, and One Steel Wollongong.
"When David Peters, Country Energy's information technology manager, faced the prospect of dwindling platform and application support for the company's proprietary Unix systems, he took a step toward migrating the company's core business systems to open source software. Peters wanted to leverage the large amount of in-house Unix skills within the IT department by choosing Linux as the operating system platform for front-end applications..."
