Seah Hong Yee, IT manager, Polyscientific Enterprise

Polyscientific Enterprise, a company which manufactures and distributes chemicals and industrial products for the Southeast Asian market, has no regrets about its decision to implement open-source software (OSS). The company has tried several OSS, including office productivity suite OpenOffice.org, Novell SuSe Linux Desktop/Enterprise 9, Mandriva Linux (previously known as Mandrake Linux), and Samba for file and print services.

"In the beginning, it was more or less to save cost. Our company was growing fast and our IT infrastructure was unable to catch up with our business requirements, plus we were experiencing problems with our servers and applications," said Seah Hong Yee, the IT manager at Polyscientific Enterprise.

With the help of the firm's technical team, Seah first replaced basic software such as file sharing and office applications.

He added that the company's Windows NT server used to crash as often as once a week. Although the firm had software licenses for 15 clients, the server frequently experienced overloads with just 10 users. Therefore, to reduce the load on the Windows NT 4.0 server, Seah added a Linux box running Samba for file and print services.

Over time, he added, staff became more familiar with the Linux server environment. "And when the Linux desktops became available, the company decided to look into deploying Linux on the desktops as well," he said. The firm uses a mix of Novell Linux Desktop 9 and Mandriva Linux.

According to Seah, Polyscientific Enterprise enjoyed several benefits by adopting OSS.

"Because there are less licensing issues involved, we were able to deploy a lot more different desktop applications, such as desktop publishing and graphic tools, that normally required a separate license in Windows, and in which case we would never have deployed anyway," said Seah.

As Polyscientific Enterprise moved further along the path of migration, it deployed other open-source applications such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) from Compiere and CRM (customer relationship management) from openCRX.

"We needed an application to track inventory, finance as well as customers' problems. The company was expanding, it became impossible for customer service representative to know what was being done with a particular customer by another co-worker," he explained.

"You may want a separate ERP package that is not related to your CRM vendor and share information between the applications. This is possible with open source because the source codes are available. Information can be consolidated by pulling information out of two or three databases and putting them into a fourth database. We are able to use some open-source OLAP tools to gain simple business intelligence with a pivot table as the presentation table," said Seah. "These were done without ever worrying about additional database licensing cost," he added.

Another advantage, he added, is the ability to modify applications to suit the organization's workflow rather than having to re-engineer to the so-called "industrial best practices" heavily promoted by the vendor.

First steps
Before the company began adopting open-source, it first evaluated the technology based on its features and availability of support.

Seah said the software had to be deployable "on the fly" and require little maintenance. Stability was also an important issue, as the company did not have dedicated IT staff.

To date, the company has only one full-time person taking care of the company's IT operations. Seah explained that maintenance of the company's IT infrastructure is an added responsibility for the technical team who lend a hand during their spare time.

One of the first things Seah also did was to develop a roadmap for migrating to the open-source software. The company decided to take it slow and to switch one application at a time. They switched the server platform first and slowly migrated the workstations.

Getting buy-in
After selecting the software and deciding on the best approach to take, the next step was to convince management to adopt the software. Seah said the management's main concern was the impact the change could have on existing business processes.

He said management were reassured that there would be minimal problems on the server side since the company was only going to migrate from Windows NT server to another Linux file server running Samba.

Convincing the rest of the organization's computer users was also a challenge.

Seah shared that switching the desktop application posed a problem, because there was no equivalent of Lotus SmartSuite on the Linux desktop operating system. In addition, there were concerns about support, data compatibility and the ability of users to adapt.

He said that not many users were comfortable using OpenOffice.org, because it had a different interface design to Windows. "Instead of switching wholesale, only a few departments switched to the Linux desktop and OpenOffice.org office suite," Seah noted. "Others continued to use Windows 98 desktop with OpenOffice.org."