DreamWorks wins an award for its innovative use of Linux, Feb 07, 2008

Linux (and principally Red Hat Enterprise Linux) has become the primary production platform for the animation industry, largely due to the engineering efforts of DreamWorks. Behind that effort sits Ed Leonard, chief technology officer at DreamWorks, who has been recognized for his work with an Annie Award for "promoting the Linux open system for animation in animation studios and gaming software development."

Expensive and error-prone digital tapes has forced BBC UK, one of the world's largest television broadcasters, to look at using computers running Linux to help produce its programs.

We are using two dozen open source products, thanks to which we have saved close to $6 million for Virgin America in the last two years. Products today are mature enough to not cause undue risk. Our e-Commerce site, which does 80 per cent of our business today, runs on open source.

British Airways (BA) has set up a special innovation unit to explore ways the airline can use web 2.0, shareware and open source technologies.

Grid computing makes modelling of energy sources very accurate and helps manage them as efficiently as possible

South African Linux and open source specialist Synaq has been contracted to manage and maintain the Linux-based network infrastructure for The Pro Shop, a national supplier of golfing product and services.

The movie industry may be accustomed to using Linux for creative design and high-powered clustering but Happy Feet creator Animal Logic is content to have the penguin run the bulk of its corporate services.

The French automaker PSA Peugeot Citroen is slated to become one of the few large scale conversions to desktop Linux.

Virgin America calls their new in-flight entertainment system “Red,” but it is really a gigantic sociological experiment in airborne distributed computing.

Motor manufacturer BMW Group is using Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLED) and Xen virtualisation software in its data center.

Qantas will next month shift the underlying platform running its internal finance systems from Linux to IBM's Unix variant AIX as part of its wide-ranging eQ transformation project.

Linux may be an operating system synonymous with a flightless bird, but Loyalty Pacific, the company behind popular retail loyalty and rewards program FlyBuys, has announced it will jet its infrastructure to open source software.

"We wanted to get car the rental system, Cars Plus, onto a new set of servers," Morton said. "In doing so we looked at Solutions First and one of its recommendations was to move away from Red Hat to Ubuntu Linux, which we did."

European car manufacturing giant PSA Peugeot Citroen has agreed to one of the continent's largest-ever deployments of open-source Linux software on desktop computers.

In the face of a big vertical marketing blitz by Microsoft, keenly evident at last week's National Retail Federation (NRF) show, several retailers in the "household name" category keep forging ahead with Linux implementations of their internal computer systems anyway.

After noting very little reseller representation of Linux, Quail has nestled itself into selling Linux-based solutions, which was what originally led the company to Adaptec. Quail has experienced 60 percent growth each quarter since its founding approximately 18 months ago.

Faced with a choice between adding more HP-UX and Solaris boxes, or moving to Intel hardware with Linux, CitiStreet chose the latter. Today the company is enjoying enhanced stability and security, and drastically lower costs.

Local poultry producer Bartter Enterprises is evaluating the future of around 70 Microsoft Windows servers, in the context of a recent migration of other systems to Red Hat Linux.

Fast-food chain McDonald's is reportedly piloting Linux-based electronic signage at a location in Chicago. The Golden Arches at Archer and Rutherford is using content-managed digital signage for menu-board promotion, dining- and play-room adver-tainment, and customer information collection, according to an article at SelfService.org.

Kennards Hire is ready to replace Windows server with Linux at 90 branches, to accompany 400 desktops already running the open source operating system.

What the world needs now, according to a Japanese research group, is a low-cost programmable robot.

Hawker de Havilland, the local arm of aircraft engineering giant Boeing, will retire its 30-year-old VAX system in favour of its new Linux-based environment in the manufacture of parts for the company's next-generation 787 jets.

Despite all the talk of offshoring software development to developing nations, computer and electronics giant Toshiba is expanding its Sydney research and development centre, which uses Linux as its platform of choice.

Behind the scenes on Wall Street, who is really using Linux? Although developers remain the major practitioners, Linux is also making headway these days as a grid platform for transaction processing, a place for running algorithmic trading engines, and even as a desktop environment, according to participants in this week's SIA (Securities Industry Association) conference in New York City.

Ever wonder how Lightning McQueen and friends looked so good in the movie Cars? A lot of that spit and polish came from the Pixar Animation Studio's Linux workstations and servers.

When Backcountry.com, an outdoor sporting goods retailer, was looking for shopping cart software, it picked an open source application called Interchange. It worked so well that the company began an enterprise-wide migration to open source software that has Linux running everywhere, from the servers to the desktops.

Kevin Mauldin's younger brother Gary was CEO of Denver-based La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries, an independent four-store retailer of La-Z-Boy, Inc. furniture. When Gary died in 2002 as the result of complications from an accident, Kevin inherited the CEO's job and an IT infrastructure that had been built from scratch by his technologically talented sibling. Unfortunately, it was such a patchwork of disparate technologies that no one else could easily sort it out. Mauldin decided on an IT overhaul, aimed at planting La-Z-Boy firmly on a Linux foundation.

Linux and open source is behind most of the special effects you see in the movies, software engineer Andre Pang, from Rising Sun Pictures (RSP), revealed at Linuxworld last week.

ASX-listed underwear, fashion design and direct sales company UnderCoverWear (UCW) has revealed how building its business around Linux and open source increased IT flexibility while avoiding vendor lock-in.

Automotive electronics manufacturer and a supplier to big names like General Motors Holden, Australian Arrow has migrated half its servers to Linux in two years to gain greater stability.

Stonebridge Bank is a small, relatively young company with seven years under its belt and a staff of 60 employees. But that didn't stop the number of servers at this West Chester, Penn.-based bank from spiraling out of control.

A move to the Linux operating system and open source applications more than a year ago played a key role in DreamWorks' transition to a service-oriented architecture.

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.

A leading sporting goods manufacturer is switching to Linux after seeing the need to consolidate platforms among its many divisions.

The company running the German railway system has moved half of its servers to Linux, and expects to have more than 300 Linux servers in operation by the end of this year

After evaluating the options, Phillips says AIG chose to work with Sage Line 500 on Linux, configured, installed and supported by Sage Enterprise Solutions authorised business partner, Unisource.

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

Organisations want reliable, low-cost, scaleable IT solutions, so why are they still buying Microsoft server technology?

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