Ten thousand more PCs migrated to Ubuntu Linux

German insurance giant chooses open-source

Canonical unveiled an inspirational deal with the German insurance giant LVM Versicherungen . This is a translation of 10,000 PCs used in the company's operations to Ubuntu Linux.

The project involved the translation of 3000 PCs and laptops at the head office of LVM in Münster; and then another 7,000 in company agencies all over Germany. The main application used by the company is LAS , a system of handling insurance claims of its own design (in Java), integrated with Lotus Notes, Adobe Reader and OpenOffice.

This news did not become a complete surprise, since LVM has already used Ubuntu for some time. But the translation of the entire fleet of the company can already be called a small coup.

LVM can be called a rather demanding environment for any OS. The company's staff is complemented by a small army of freelance mobile agents who sell insurance on the streets and going home. And the LAS system is used by salespeople constantly.
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The official press release does not mention which operating systems were replaced, but Techworld believes that these were old versions of Windows.

“Many companies are beginning to realize that there is an alternative to this infinite range of payments for licenses, which can result in millions of dollars. We are confident that LVM's investment in switching to Ubuntu in cooperation with Canonical will pay off many times over. "

- said Canonical Vice President of Business Development, Steve George .

Is this another sign of the wider distribution of Linux, or is it an isolated case? In general, the history of using Linux in Germany shows that such mass installation histories are rather anomalous deviations against the background of the overall commitment of Windows. (As an example, a project to translate the administration of Munich )

It probably all depends on the type of business and on the applications that require support. Few companies buy Windows from a big love for Microsoft. Rather, in the assurance that Redmond is a stronghold of relative stability in the industry where companies appeared in the past and then disappeared, leaving applications without support. And now the Canonical model seems to be stable enough to compete in some cases.

However, last year, for example, the government of the Swiss canton of Solothurn returned to Windows 7 after long and difficult attempts to migrate to Debian / GNU. Of course, there were special circumstances in that project, but on the whole the movement is observed in both directions.