Carrion and Linux 

How are others succeeding with Linux? Carrion, Ltd. offers property management and investment services in California. On May 19, 2003 I talked to Fred Clausen, Carrion, Ltd. System Administrator, to better understand Linux's impact on his firm's success.

P: How are you using Linux today?

Mr. Clausen: We're using Linux for all our web servers, plus, we're using Linux to support our IBM Small Business Suite. Linux also serves as our database server for Great Plains and Management Plus for Windows. We completed our Linux conversion for the Great Plains database server back in November 2002. We haven't had a single problem.

P: What are your plans for Linux? How important is Linux in your 18 to 24 month roadmap?

Mr. Clausen: Linux will remain our standard server OS. But, we operate a mixed environment of Linux and Windows servers. We'll maintain that mix for the near term. Linux will remain our OS for critical servers, especially database servers. We are closely watching the development of Linux clients. Once we are comfortable with it's capabilities and maturity on the desktop will switch there as well.

P: Why did you consider Linux?

Mr. Clausen: We really liked the stability of our old Novell servers. We've had some difficulty with other solutions. Linux has the kind of stability and sophistication we need. Our web servers have been running Linux for more than two years.

P: What are the benefits of Linux?

Mr. Clausen: Stability. Price. Easy to configure and setup.

P: What are the key business drivers?

Mr. Clausen: Price. Reliability.

P: What are the key technical drivers?

Mr. Clausen: Stability. It's easier to integrate systems. We also enjoy working with vendors that support open source.

P: What is or will be the biggest hurdle to Linux adoption in your organization?

Mr. Clausen: There was a learning curve, but once you're past that it is easy.

P: How has your experience been supporting Pervasive.SQL on Linux?

Mr. Clausen: We're really happy with Pervasive.SQL on Linux. It was easy to install and it's been really successful. We budgeted three days to complete our Great Plains database conversion from Windows to Linux. We finished in only eight hours. We haven't had a single problem since we went live in November 2002.