And even though it was business as usual for the frontline employees, vice president Tommy Rouse knew things were very different.Rouse’s Supermarkets has been a family owned and operated grocery chain since 1959, when Tommy Rouse’s father started with one small store. The younger Rouse grew up living next door to the store, and so naturally he feels “deeply involved” in everything that happens with the business, which today has expanded to 15 stores.

Rouse’s has been utilizing ACR Retail point-of-sale (POS) systems since 1991. ACR, based in Jacksonville, Fla., has been providing software and systems integrations for grocery and drug stores since 1975.

ACR ported its ACR 5000 POS software to Linux about three years ago; before that, the company had worked with Linux for two years in a testing environment. When it came time for Rouse’s to upgrade its POS systems, ACR president and CEO John Huffman suggested thin clients and a server running ACR 5000 on Linux.

Tommy Rouse wasn’t a stranger to Linux. His IT staff had been using it for back office operations for several years, coding custom applications for data storage and retrieval. That experience, coupled with the desire to upgrade clunky Microsoft-powered boxes at each register to easily maintainable thin clients, made it easy for Rouse’s to say “yes” to Huffman’s suggestion.

In June 2003, Rouse and Huffman launched a single test store to “feel their way around it,” according to Rouse. By May 2004, they were ready to start rolling out the new system to the rest of the stores, and the switch was complete by July.

For Rouse, the top benefit Linux brings to the company is lower initial cost and lower overhead. Huffman agreed, citing the flexibility his customers have when choosing Linux as the base OS.

“[With Linux] we can supply the functionality from the server and leave the client utterly dumb,” Huffman said. The thin client “evolution” has resulted in drastically lower component costs, making the terminals so economical as to become almost “disposable.” Not only that, but stores like Rouse’s no longer need to hire highly paid technical people, since no special training is required to replace a thin client if something goes wrong. “Rouse’s keeps a couple of spare terminals in the back. If one breaks, all you have to do is plug it in — no software installation or configuration,” Huffman said.

Another benefit to using Linux is the flexibility it allows when selecting server iron. Rouse was pleased that he and his staff were able to build their own servers for less than $500 each. Because of the low cost, Rouse was able to install a separate cold backup server in most of the stores. “If we lose a server we can back that one in remotely just by making a couple of quick software changes,” he said.

Huffman is enthusiastic about the future of Linux in the POS space. The key, he said, is the ability to completely remove the operating system from the thin clients, something proprietary operating system providers do not allow, since that would cut deeply into their revenue. “Microsoft is trying to do thin clients, but they’ve got to keep their software in there,” Huffman said. “They don’t want to give it up. They live on the desktop and if that’s eliminated, they lose their market. They’re very desperate to keep some intelligence in their terminals. With Linux, we can do thin clients for effectively no cost, and Microsoft can’t. I love it.”

Jackson wanted to keep Sybase, in part because of the familiarity factor. “We looked at other databases like MySQL and SQL Server for Windows, and even considered just upgrading Sybase and running Solaris again. It made sense financially and from an ease of implementation standpoint to stay with Sybase, but with a much more current version running on Intel and Linux.” While MySQL is free, Sybase allowed Western & Southern to port its current licenses to the new infrastructure. Besides, MySQL didn’t pass Jackson’s evaluation with flying colors. “It just wasn’t good security-wise,” he says. “It’s not even close yet. It was missing a lot of the functionality that we needed.”

Even though MySQL didn’t pass muster, Linux was just fine. “We took Linux through the trials. We installed, we tested, and made sure everything matched up the way we expected it to. We had big concerns on the database side — moving the data is pretty easy but the key is the code. Anything that has database-specific code in it is a concern when migrating. By staying with Sybase, we didn’t have to rewrite the code, and that saved us hundreds of hours.”

Western & Southern reports an 80% decrease in batch cycle times on the new database servers running Linux, as well as a 60% reduction in the number of servers needed, which further reduced both hardware and software license costs.

Jackson’s biggest challenge with migrating to Linux has been version matching. “It becomes kind of sticky with all the different pieces. Versions are changing so fast now, you have to make sure vendors match the version between the database, the applications, and the operating system.”

Jackson’s experience with Linux has been so good that the company is now looking at other areas in which it could use the open source operating system. “I can’t say a whole lot about it, but we’re looking at some open source Web technologies and workflow software, and some other things.”

For other IT directors looking at migrating to an open source platform, Jackson recommends thorough testing. “They’ve got to be able to have a good test bed,” he says. “It helps to have a good understanding of how the application functions as it is now, and will it be able to bring the functionality you expect. That goes back to having people who are familiar with the application and how it will work. Especially with a database, it’s good to have people who can understand the code. Being able to play with it and experiment and get comfortable with it yourself, before you commit, is key.”

Amy Begg De Groff, the library’s IT director, says Howard County libraries are well supported by its patrons. “We get very gracious funding from the county residents, but the majority of the money goes to [book] collections and payroll. So the funding just doesn’t keep up with our IT needs.” Because of that, five years ago, the library was exploring alternatives to Microsoft Windows and its steep licensing fees.

De Groff says the library created and deployed a custom kernel that provided patrons with a browser to search the catalog and access the Internet. They wanted more. “Word processing, instant messaging, sound, video -– they just wanted more, more more,” she says. “When they walk in and see a computer, they expect it to function just like it does at home.”

The library wanted to grant its patrons’ wishes without leaving Linux behind. “We were very committed to open source. We exploring building another kernel or going with a vendor.” De Groff says they looked at Userful’s DiscoverStation, a popular choice with other public libraries moving to open source software, but “we felt locked down with too many of the options. We didn’t like the look of it –- we wanted to offer something as close to XP as possible. And with Userful, what we found is that as we slowly took away functionality, we broke other things.”

The other alternative De Groff tested was Groovix, an Ubuntu-based distribution that provides many of the options consumers expect from their desktop experience. “After I saw the Groovix deployment, with RealPlayer and other media support, there was no turning back. We begin piloting in January and it went effortlessly.” De Groff tested the operating system on her existing hardware, upgrading the RAM from 128MB to 512MB. “The bulk of them are Dell GX150s with some GX100s,” she says. “The newest machines are four years old.” De Groff also added GCompris, a GPLed educational software package for children that includes more than 80 games.

De Groff advises other libraries considering a move to open source software to do their homework first. “I recommend an extensive survey of customer activity,” she says. “We talked to our staff and they said the customers were searching the catalog. But when we talked to the customers, they said, ‘We’re reading email and doing online banking.’ And then when we tracked hits, 70% of them were to MySpace. They may also be banking and need a secure system, but the audio and video are obviously very important as well. Your feedback from the staff isn’t always consistent with the data you’re going to generate -– so put it all together and meet all those needs.” And don’t forget training, De Groff says. “You need to extensively train your front line staff. We did three hours of hands-on, mandatory training.”

De Groff says the biggest benefit of the upgrade has been the added functionality at a cost that is a fraction of what licensed proprietary systems would have been. “We spent $2,000 in tech support and $25 system-wide for the software,” she says. “The biggest expense was the RAM upgrade, which cost $20,000. Oh, and I bought some T-shirts.”

CHW’s primary business is providing acute care, defined as treatment for a short-term or episodic illness or health problem. Erik Leader, chief technical architect for CHW, says his company used to focus solely on a variety of proprietary applications, a mix which included “all the major players in the field. We have just about one of everything.” As CHW grew through the acquisition of other hospitals, the IT mix became a nearly unmanageable hodgepodge of disparate systems, many times further separated by the lack of interoperability provided by proprietary standards. “Over the last five years we’ve focused on standardization and consolidation,” Leader says. “We decided to move to more open standards so we weren’t dependent on one particular vendor or technology.”

As Leader began exploring the open source world, he discovered the open source community and liked what he saw. “[The] community was embracing open standards and technologies, especially in the healthcare area, so we started pursuing that. What we found was that a lot of our vendors were also looking at open source and moving toward open standards.”

Leader says CHW’s open source strategy focuses on the long term. “How can we leverage open standards and open source applications to improve cost and reliability and access to patient information for our caregivers? We found that most proprietary solutions in identity management security were rather confining,” he says. “We have lots of regulatory compliance we need to keep at the state and federal level. It would be very difficult to continue to meet those needs with the systems we had.” With regulations such as HIPAA, health care providers must show that patient care records are maintained with the strictest privacy.

Because of the importance of high level of trust needed in identity management, one of the first open source implementations at CHW was the Open Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (OpenLDAP) used by Novell in its eDirectory application. LDAP uses a directory tree to store information in a central repository. IT departments like to use LDAP as a means of identifying and authorizing users on a network. “We looked at Microsoft -– they support some of the [LDAP] standards; and Oracle’s identity management; and Sun’s Netscape ID management.” Ultimately, Leader says CHW went with Novell because of what he calls its overall commitment to open source. “[Open source] is a better, less expensive way of providing IT support to our caregivers,” he says. “Part of it is the fact that the code is open and available to everybody, so there’s a constant inspection of it going on by people who wish to make it stronger. We’ve found that the correction of security errors and holes is faster in the open source community than in proprietary solutions. We see many more security issues with our proprietary solutions.”

One of the challenges Leader faces in his drive toward open source adoption is resistance from his own industry. “Not all of our software vendors are yet embracing open source,” he says. “In general, IT in the healthcare industry tends to lag. They are slow to adopt and risk-averse.” That resistance has pushed CHW out to the bleeding edge of open source in healthcare, past the larger and more established software vendors to the newer, smaller companies. “Once we got into that we found there were a lot of companies that had begun supporting open standards,” Leader says. “In many cases we partnered with them to help them identify direction and to jointly manage the risk of moving in that direction.”

The changes in the infrastructure don’t disrupt the end users. “We try to make all of our changes as transparent to the caregivers as possible,” Leader says. “A lot of what we do they don’t really know that its being done with open source -– nor do they really care.” CHW has begun pilots and assessments of Linux desktops, but “we don’t have a whole lot of it out there,” he says.

CHW is progressing in its move toward complete open source penetration by upgrading existing solutions as it becomes necessary. “We have roughly 200 application servers running on [SUSE] platforms,” Leader says. “We’re rapidly moving toward 100% open source.”