Polonious director Stuart Guthrie said IMAN can now see a whole-of-business view of the member, including age details and country of origin, and staff can record notes on what the company needs to do for members, so it's like a member CRM system.

"Hibernate gives database independence, and we will do more Ajax where there is a business benefit using Dojo," Guthrie said. "Spring has saved us massive amounts of Java code."

Guthrie said the performance of Java on Linux is great, but it might be a while before we use the newly open sourced OpenJDK."

IMAN is also working on integrating information from third parties like e-mail, fax and paper letters, which will be scanned and entered into the system.

The federal government is working on paperless billing for health insurance claims, but that could be five years away.

"We've reduced letters and paperwork, and we use OpenOffice.org to form letters which can be rendered to PDF," Guthrie said. "New business needs go into the core system, and we kill spreadsheets when we find them."

Guthrie is confident the application can scale from a laptop to a mainframe and JBoss clustering allows nodes to be added to satisfy demand.

IMAN estimates the 457 Visa permits issued will go from 40,000 now to 300,000 in five years.

"We tested it on WebShpere and could run it on Oracle or DB2," Guthrie said. "Fujitsu helped with tuning for PostgreSQL and we now have some 300,000 audit logs and growing, as we are logging every system change."

Polonious is contributing changes and bug reports back to the open source community, notably with JSON tools where it worked out how to handle complex objects and sent a patch back.

According to Braithwaite, in a lot of industries the call centre is separated from the CRM system, but now notes are taken electronically.

"The key to our success is case management and you can only do that if you have a whole view," he said. "A substantial number of members are time pressed IT workers and once you give people the opportunity to correspond via e-mail they won't go back. Going open source allowed a communications system based almost exclusively on e-mail."

Braithwaite said the ability to quickly discard one product for another is compelling feature of open source, and working with one language like Java is better than working with a variety.