Sidebar: Early Adopter Stands Firm on Linux Desktop

By Carol Sliwa

December 15, 2003 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corp. couldn't turn to any of its retail peers for advice five years ago when it began deploying Linux-based desktops.
At the time, the Burlington, N.J.-based company made one of the largest commitments to Linux to date, rolling out more than 1,000 Linux PCs. It was the largest Linux retail installation ever announced by a U.S. company. The pioneering move was an outgrowth of Burlington Coat's Unix heritage.
Looking back, CIO Mike Prince said Linux has proved to be a "good, reliable" operating system, and the move was "absolutely" worth it. The company has even substantially increased its Linux deployment since the operating system first crept into its development labs in 1998, when college interns insisted on using it.
A year later, Burlington Coat Factory began rolling out a half-dozen Linux-based desktops to each of its stores for managers and inventory clerks to use, and last year the company completed its migration of an average of 15 cash registers in each of its 350 stores to Linux. So Burlington Coat Factory is now deploying about 7,000 Linux-based clients, according to Prince.
Prince said the move has been economical because of the thin-client approach that the company has taken to deliver key business applications over its frame-relay network. Users access the applications through Web browsers, so when changes are made to the software, they don't have to be installed on thousands of desktops, he noted.
The reduction in licensing costs wasn't a major issue for Prince. He said the company's total cost of ownership declined because the systems were easy to administer and to lock down so users couldn't install applications on their own. He said that keeping the store systems running requires only one or two workers in his network group.
Supporting Roles
"We have more people supporting a handful of Windows users than roughly 7,000 Linux systems," Prince said. He added that the Linux systems "just sit there and don't break. They run and run and run. People can't mess them up. They don't get messed up on their own. Unless there's a hardware problem, we almost never have to do anything with them."


Mike Prince, CIO at Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corp.

Prince said that if the company needs support for its Linux desktops or servers, he has found plenty of options through partners such as IBM, its Linux vendors (Red Hat Inc., and SUSE Linux AG, which Novell Inc. recently announced plans to acquire) and third-party support providers.
"We've had far fewer issues getting

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