5 years ago… Insurance giant goes live with Linux

06.08.1999: In what is being hailed as the world's first full-scale deployment of Linux in the finance sector, insurance company Hill House Hammond has signed a deal with IBM to run the Linux operating system on its Netfinity servers.

The IBM system will roll out to Hill House Hammond's entire 250-strong branch computing network - the order totalling 290 Netfinity 3000 servers. Hill House Hammond has chosen the Red Hat Linux OS with an application installation program designed by Pick Systems.

Rob Hailstone, research director for Bloor Research, agreed that this was the first significant move into the financial world for the open source technology - and more bad news for NT.

"Linux has been bad news for NT for a number of months - this is just another first," he said. "People will be watching this carefully to see if it is a success."

06.08.2004:The server room proved the first battleground where the Penguin started to challenge Microsoft as businesses started looking at moving from their old Unix mainframes.

Microsoft started picking up market share in the server operating system market, first with its Windows 2000 Data Centre edition and more recently with Windows Server 2003, making good headway against Linux.

But that battle has now extended to the desktop, although a consensus appears to be that it will be some time before Linux makes any significant dent in Microsoft's share of the corporate desktop operating system market.

There are, however, signs that large user organisations in both the public and private sector are at least evaluating the benefits of Linux in trial runs on the back of the increasing cost of software licences and upgrade cycles and security concerns over Windows.

The UK government is running several trials of Sun's StarOffice and IBM's Linux systems with a view to larger framework agreements for the public sector if successful. In Germany, the city of Munich is the first major organisation to move from Windows to Linux, although that now appears to be in trouble.