“In February, Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Inc. became one
of the largest companies to commit to a rollout of more than 1,000
Linux PCs and servers… CIO Mike Prince, a keynote speaker at this
week’s Linux World Conference & Expo in San Jose, told
Computerworld senior writer David Orenstein on Aug. 2 that
Linux has performed very well so far but has been hindered by
inconsistent support from application vendors.
Q: How is the rollout going?
A: The first thing we did … we were opening up a new
distribution center … and we needed to deploy about 50 desktops
there, and we deployed Linux. It exceeded our expectations. It has
been invisible operationally to me that we put Linux over
there.
As we’ve been opening stores all spring and summer, we’ve been
deploying Linux. That’s gone well, too. I don’t know of any
glitches. A total of [1,250] machines are going to get shipped [to
older stores], probably while we are out at Linux World. Our
experience in at least a dozen [new] stores is it has done
everything we expected.”
“Q: Do you have a sense about whether owning a Linux PC will
cost less than other operating systems?
A: Yes. Everybody involved with the project so far feels like in
every way that for lower support requirements and stability, Linux
has met its objectives. It’s about as stable and reliable and easy
to support as we think any operating system could be.”