Small Business: Case studies

With 56 chemist stores spread across three states, National Pharmacies needed to improve its manual backup process which relied on removable media like tape and DVD.

When TV production company FremantleMedia Australia had an opportunity to move to IP telephony during an office refurbishment, the open source Asterisk proved itself to offer everything required and more for the 150-plus handset deployment.

I've been writing about the use of open source software in business for nearly a decade and during that time I discovered the level of interest in free software to be somewhere between non-existent to various point solutions for routine or mission-critical tasks. It was therefore with pleasant surprise that I was invited to report on the activities of an independent Sydney-based health insurance company, IMAN International Pty Ltd, which has committed to an end-to-end open source strategy and is reaping measurable results.