DeLaval Voluntary Milking System, Oct 23, 2005

A 122-year-old dairy equipment company has used embedded Linux in a robotic cow-milking system (the system is robotic, not the cows). The Voluntary Milking System (VMS) allows cows to decide when to be milked, and gives dairy farmers a more independent lifestyle, free from regular milkings, the company says.

Nautical equipment manufacturer Kelvin Hughes has become one of the first UK firms to implement an enterprise resource planning system based on 64-bit Linux.

The Jordan Commercial Bank (JCBank) has implemented a new and comprehensive banking system, based on Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Application Server 10g, and deployed on a Linux operating system.

JSW Steel has implemented Oracle E-Business Suite on Red Hat Linux on IBM eServer X 365 Xeon MP and IBM eServer X 445 Xeon MP.

... all too often vendors have been trying to push such technology on their novelty or 'Linux for Linux' sake', rather than selling it on the business benefits.

Continental Airlines encountered a bit of turbulence last year when it decided to shift the ticket-reissue application it had built for Unix-based servers to a full open-source software stack with a 64-bit database server

Statoil, Norway's largest oil company, has made a 50% cost saving by migrating from proprietary Unix operating systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Volvo Car Corp., which has been using supercomputers for vehicle crash test simulations for years, has selected IBM to build a powerful, new Linux supercomputer for its safety tests.

A Linux device helped legendary independent filmmaker Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Desperado, Spy Kids, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and others) win the race with ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) to create the first movie ever to use a digital format supporting full-bandwidth RGB.

Pioneer Petroleum is the largest independent gasoline retailer in Ontario, with 150 retail locations spread throughout the province. Twenty-five of those locations are running Red Hat Linux Workstation 3.0. The other 125 stores are expected to be rid of Windows by the end of 2005.

Linux got a leg up from Freescale Semiconductor Inc. and the China Ministry of Information Industry (MII), which announced this morning plans to jointly establish a lab based in Beijing to develop complete evaluation systems for the open operating system (OS) and PowerPC core.

Despite trumpeting a significant migration from Unix to Linux as part of 10-year IBM global services outsourcing agreement inked last year, Qantas is reluctant to disclose details about the scale of the project.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange credits its migration to commodity Intel-based servers and Linux with cutting costs and shaving 100 milliseconds off the time required to complete a trade.

 View older news this year: Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan
 View news from other years: 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999
 View older news in category Industry this year: Jul Feb Jan
 View Industry news from other years: 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000