IBM today announced a range of new deals that will allow
government agencies across Europe to opt in to the benefits of open
standards software. Building on recent ground breaking engagements,
such as IBM’s framework agreement with the German Ministry of the
Interior, these new Linux contracts will allow a variety of
European public sector services–from police forces to tax
departments, universities and pension providers–to lower their IT
costs, improve the responsiveness of their technology and to create
new revenue opportunities for local business communities.
New Linux deals announced today include: Brussels-based Union
des Classes Moyennes (UCM), a government agency that calculates
salaries for doctors and dentists; Finland-based Kela, one of the
country’s major pension providers; the French Ministry of
Education; the Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics, in
Germany; Agencia Estatal de Administraciãn Tributaria, a
public tax agency for the Spanish Ministry of Finance; and the West
Yorkshire Police force.
“Over the past twelve months IBM has seen open standards
software like Linux move squarely into the mainstream for
governments across Europe,” said Piero Corsini, IBM VP Public
Sector Europe. “We’re now well past the ‘tipping point,’ and
today’s new deals reinforce the wide-ranging benefits that open
standards software brings to the Public Sector. It’s a bigger
thought than just costs–the use of software like Linux allows
government agencies to do more sophisticated things with
e-business, and its use also presents local economies with a range
of commercial opportunities–like delivering new support services
and building new applications.”
In commercial terms, adoption of the open source operating
system Linux continues to outstrip any other operating system on
the market today–at a compound annual rate of 35 percent,
according to IDC studies. According to industry analysts like Giga
and IDC, Linux is also projected to become the dominant server
operating system in the next three to four years. Linux adoption by
governments and other public sector institutions is growing faster
than the overall growth rate–at a 38% compound annual growth rate
from 2001-2006, compared to 35% overall.
The general market ecosystem that surrounds Linux continues to
grow rapidly, generating new revenue for government agencies and
small businesses in new markets. Today, more than 44,000
independent software vendors and corporate developers around the
world are working with IBM to create new Linux-based applications.
These ISVs are rapidly capitalizing on the number of Linux-based
solutions–in fact IBM saw a growth rate of over 40 per cent of new
Linux applications created world wide last year.
In addition, the number of IBM business partners actively
working on Linux across the world has grown 800% since the
beginning of 2001.
Further details on today’s new IBM Linux engagements
include:
Brussels-based Union des Classes Moyennes (UCM) is a government
agency that calculates salaries for small doctors and dentists
agencies in the French-speaking regions of Belgium. To consolidate
its workload onto a single server, UCM has now upgraded to a new
Linux-based IBM eServer to lower its total cost of ownership and to
improve the reliability of its service.
Helsinki, Finland-based Kela is one of that country’s major
pension providers. In order to offer more services online and
support business growth, Kela needed to add capacity to its
technology infrastructure.
However, it also needed to reduce its IT costs to stay
profitable. The company has now chosen to consolidate its servers,
replacing old systems with two eServer zSeries systems running SuSE
Linux. The IBM/Linux solution gives Kela plenty of processing
capacity for future growth. The company has calculated savings of
80,000 Euros so far and expects greater savings in the future.
The French Ministry of Education wanted to update and modernize
its education system, not only to maintain a competitive edge, but
to better prepare its students to become professionals and
productive citizens. To achieve these goals, the ministry wanted to
increase access to educational resources, improve collaboration
among classes and facilitate exchanges among teachers nationally
and internationally.
The Ministry of Education has now decided to implement a
nationwide messaging, collaboration and e-learning solution based
on IBM Lotus Notes and Domino and RedHat Linux V5. With this
system, high school teachers can set up online bulletin boards to
assign and collect homework; graduate students can do research and
get feedback on their studies; children can master computer skills
they’ll need in the workplace; and unique classes can be offered
over the Web to remote locations. In the pilot project, affecting
5,000 users, the Ministry of Education finds has found that
teachers and researchers are more productive. The Linux platform
ensures that the system can expand while maintaining stability and
keeping costs low.
The Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics, in Freiburg,
Germany, performs applied research for the German government on how
materials behave under shock and impact. The institute needed a
high-performance computing platform to support massively parallel
calculations that simulate crashes and measure reactions. The
platform would have to support specialized scientific applications
and be extremely robust and scalable. The Fraunhofer Institute has
now implemented an IBM High Performance Computing Linux Cluster,
consisting of 128 IBM eServer xSeries machines running Red Hat
Linux. The system’s benchmark test reported a capacity of 605
gigaflops, putting it among the top 500 highest-performing
supercomputing systems in the world. The institute can now more
effectively research how materials shatter, deform, flow or
vaporize under impact.
Agencia Estatal de Administraciãn Tributaria (AEAT) is a
public tax agency that is part of the Spanish Ministry of Finance.
The agency is responsible for tax collection, tax management, tax
auditing and customs management. AEAT runs an internal network with
an intranet, but for security reasons could not access the Internet
through its internal system. This was a major interference for the
AEAT day-to-day business processes, for which it needs easy and
reliable access to the Web to access official information related
to the Central Administration of Spain. A new IBM zSeries and Linux
solution has now been put in place, allowing AEAT to access the web
whilst still maintaining its high security standards. By using
IBM’s zSeries and Linux to allow its employees easy access to the
web, AEAT has increased its employee productivity, saved time and
reduced costs.
The West Yorkshire Police, with the help of IBM, has now
successfully implemented VIPER, or Video Identity Parade
Electronically Recorded, an electronic video system that helps
fight crime by simplifying the picking out of suspects by witnesses
and victims. A traditional parade can cost £750 to
£1,250 and take six to ten weeks to set up, depending on the
availability of a lookalikes, witnesses, and the suspect.
Today, the new electronic parade can be displayed on any
standard laptop computer, whilst the creation, editing, storage and
retrieval of the electronic snapshots from the video database is
done at minimal cost by using Linux clusters, built up from
IBM-supplied industry standard hardware. The National VIPER Bureau
currently undertakes an average of 66 parades a day, with a peak of
110 parades a day. Using the VIPER system, a video ID parade can be
compiled within 2 hours at a cost of around £200.