Platform Diving

La Curacao is a Los Angeles-based chain of Hispanic-focused electronics stores. Its locations are decorated with symbols of ancient Mayan and Aztec civilizations: the chain's motto, "Un Poco De Su Pais," translates to "a little bit of your country."

While La Curacao enjoys strong levels of customer loyalty, its previous operating system sometimes left both customers and sales associates frustrated. Transactions could take a long time to complete, which prompted some sales associates to abort the process and start over.

The problems became more acute during the holidays or other busy periods, when sales volume could jump by several hundred percent. In addition, the system would occasionally crash and remain down for 15 or 20 minutes — usually during the company's busiest sales periods.

To alleviate these problems and better position the firm for growth, software development manager Eryk Szachniewicz worked with Novacoast, an IT professional services firm headquartered in Santa Barbara, Calif. Together, they transitioned La Curacao to a Linux-based operating system in late 2007.

Now, Szachniewicz says, "95 percent of our business runs in this environment," including POS, accounting, inventory and price checking, and the performance and speed of these applications have improved dramatically. In fact, the retailer hasn't experienced any downtime since the Linux operating system has been implemented. "All the day-to-day transactions go smoothly," he says.

La Curacao's previous operating system, Novell Netware, presented several challenges. For starters, Novell had dropped its support for the version of Netware that La Curacao was using. In addition, the architecture wasn't scalable, making it difficult to ensure the system's reliability as La Curacao added stores.

At the same time, La Curacao wanted a more robust platform, as well as a failover solution if a server went down (at the time, all applications were supported by a single server).

Szachniewicz admits to a bit of initial skepticism about the Linux platform, given that it's developed through an open-source process. He wondered how well it would work and hold up, given that no single company stands behind it.

But open-source software actually can outperform software that's developed in a proprietary manner, even though that may sound counter-intuitive at first, says Dan Elder, Linux services manager at Novacoast. For starters, the software is "incredibly reliable," he says. With so many developers working on and scrutinizing the code, any shortcomings or flaws are quickly identified and corrected.

What's more, a growing number of enterprise IT providers like Novell, HP and IBM are investing significant capital to support and leverage Linux software. "Today, it's very much a proven, established platform in data centers and the store environment," says Michael Applebaum, Novell's senior product marketing manager for SUSE Linux Enterprise. A number of large retailers, including those with international and online operations, have implemented Linux, he says.