Trilight Zone

[tricore]

Nine times out of ten, Linux migration contracts are about companies switching from Unix to Linux. This one's the tenth. Red Hat Inc. announced on February 6 in Stockholm, Sweden that the Swedish Armed Forces has decided to migrate its servers from Windows NT to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

With the deal, FMLOG Servicedesk, the Swedish Armed Forces' IT department, will be able to offer RHEL solutions to any division or branch of the military. At present, RHEL is the operating system platform on nearly 200 servers in the Armed Forces' core IT infrastructure. There, it's used to run in-house developed software.

The decision to go ahead and migrate other servers running the obsolete Windows server operating system NT to Red Hat was primarily based on its advanced security features. Another factor was Red Hat's strong support, ease of migration and its compatibility with existing in-house software.

Jonna Lidman, of the Swedish Armed Forces' headquarters, stated, "There has been a demand for Linux within the Swedish Armed Forces for quite some time, which is why we've now decided to enter this deal."

"The primary reasons for us choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux were the product lifecycle as well as Red Hat's position as the leading open source provider. What also affected the decision was the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was fairly easy to migrate and is compatible with our in-house-developed programs," Lidman added.

Werner Knoblich, Red Hat's VP, EMEA, added, "At a time when there is a lot of hype around new proprietary operating system launches, the decision of the Swedish Army to migrate from Microsoft to open source is a major testament to the flexibility, control and security of open source software."

"We are very happy to see that yet another company within the public sector has chosen Red Hat. The fact that the Swedish Armed Forces commit to Red Hat Enterprise Linux shows once again that it is a secure platform with high demands on availability and flexibility. The selection of Red Hat by the Swedish Armed Forces follows a number of public sector Linux projects in Sweden, paving the way for wider adoption within the Swedish government," Knoblich concluded.