Chicago-based company Context Media builds waiting room TV networks that help healthcare professionals educate and inspire their patients as they make crucial decisions about their lifestyle and clinical treatment. IT is critical to the company. Context Media operates approximately 600 video terminals across the United States and system uptime is key to business profi tability. Both the healthcare professionals and the advertisers need absolute assurance that the terminals Context Media manage are secure and always up and running. All of Context Media’s systems run Ubuntu and use Broadsign software to manage the order and frequency of advertising content. IT manages and updates the systems, monitors their uptime, and remotely troubleshoots problems to ensure maximum uptime and profitability at each site.

As a leading provider of wireless solutions to global telecommunication carriers and device manufacturers, Wavesat runs a tight schedule of multiple projects. Despite their many years of experience successfully bringing leading edge solutions to market they wanted to improve their productivity and efficiency. In particular, they wanted to improve their code release process and felt that their development team could benefit from a next generation version control system (VCS). After implementing Bazaar and receiving training from Canonical their development teams are seeing higher productivity and fewer code management issues, ultimately leading to more streamlined workflows and lower release costs.

The Andalusian Regional Government, Spain, wanted to improve access to IT in schools throughout the region. It asked IT services company infrastructure to connect 2,000 schools in Andalusia. Isotrol implemented 220,000 Ubuntu-based workstations in more than 2,000 schools throughout the region. Now, technology plays an integral role in delivering a more dynamic learning experience in schools across Andalusia. Teachers and students can share information quickly and easily, while each school receives dedicated support from a centralised support service.

New business Emphony Technologies needed to implement a cost-effective, reliable and available IT infrastructure. It wanted to introduce a server environment on which its infrastructure that project management applications and common workloads could both run. The company chose to implement Ubuntu Server Edition. As a result, the organisation has an easy-to-maintain, cost-effective, reliable infrastructure on which it can depend. Neither Emphony, nor its customers, have experienced any downtime since the implementation took place over a year ago. As it moves into full production, Emphony is now looking to adopt Canonical Support with Landscape systems management software to help it grow as a business.

Financial services company Equitec was running its mission-critical, proprietary trading software on 100 Windows-based servers. After experiencing a series of performance issues, the company decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Now Equitec can run its entire workload on just 30 Ubuntu-based servers, which equates to a dramatic hardware, space and power saving of 70 per cent for the same performance. Additionally, Equitec has experienced significant reduction in systems management overheads, running its critical common workloads and its trading system with a minimum of fuss, outage or maintenance. The company is seeing a very real reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO) of its IT infrastructure through switching its servers to Ubuntu.