Baseline: Voice of Experience: Unilever’s Martin Armitage

“What Went Wrong With Unix: Fragmentation of
the operating system. ‘We didn’t see it coming. Our architecture’s
doubled–which also doubles our support costs. We never had a
large-scale enterprisewide system on Unix that ran on industry
standard platforms–they run off proprietary platforms.’ As a
result, he says, hardware is a whopping 40% of his current cost
structure.

“The Linux Plan: ‘To build a road map for a
scalable enterprise system–we’re talking to IBM, HP and others. By
2005-06, we expect to have large-scale platforms that meet our
needs.’ But Unilever’s not waiting. The company’s already running
utilities and some informational Web sites on Linux, and hopes to
add nontransactional applications by the end of the year…”

Complete
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