European ceramics manufacturer Villeroy & Boch claims to have
achieved a 30%-40% cost reduction by switching its operations to a
Linux infrastructure.
The company has migrated from an HP-UX v10.20 and v11 platform to
Red Hat Linux Advanced Server for the infrastructure supporting its
SAP enterprise resource planning software across manufacturing
sites in Germany, France, Luxembourg, Italy, Hungary and
Romania.
Villeroy & Boch staff were impressed by the stability and ease
of use of Linux when the firm migrated its Web site operations from
Microsoft Internet Transaction Server to the Apache open source Web
server.
Thomas Ochs, chief information officer at Villeroy & Boch,
said, "We have massively reduced costs in investment and total cost
of ownership. We are looking at a 30%-40% saving in the cost of the
software and its ongoing support."
Ochs said the migration of the 2,300-seat infrastructure was not
without its risks, and having technical staff with the right skills
was vital.
"You need technical staff of your own that have a good feeling for
the problems in Unix and Linux and a good supplier who can provide
consultation where necessary," he said.
The migration took place following a three-week trial of SAP on
Linux on a parallel test system. The company rolled out the
infrastructure across its 40 European sites over one weekend.
Neil Ward-Dutton, research director at analyst firm Ovum, said,
"This is a unique development and the company is taking quite a
risk as there is not much evidence of businesses using Linux as a
full-blown application server, with most tending to use it for the
Web, file or print.
"The marketing message pushes the case for cost savings but there
is little evidence for this so far, so I could not recommend others
to go down this road without a lot of thought."