CGI Europe - a Riverhall customer profile

Every new company has to have a first customer. Not every company is still doing business with them 8 years later. Although our customer list has lengthened considerably since CGI Europe first signed up with us in 1995, we are glad to say that they are still an active user of Riverhall software.

CGI specializes in the printing of financial research. Although one might think that printing is just printing, this is far from being the whole truth. The information printed by CGI is both confidential and highly time-sensitive, and needs to be delivered to financial centres around the world to strict deadlines. Most of CGI's jobs arrive electronically and then need to go through "pre-press" processing to ensure that the finished document will meet the very high quality requirements of CGI's customers.

Printing is a 24x7 operation.

CGI offers a truly end-to-end service, starting with electronic submission of new jobs by CGI's clients and ending with physical delivery of the finished documents around the world. And jobs arrive, and have to be dispatched, round the clock 24 x 7. In this environment it is essential to be able to know exactly where each job is in the overall process.

After evaluating and rejecting a number of off-the-shelf packages, CGI turned to Riverhall to develop JobTracker, JobTracker enables CGI to both monitor each print job accurately, and to run off real-time production planning reports whenever required. And thanks to its Internet-based front end, they can do this from anywhere in the world. Behind the scenes, an SQL database retains exact timings and processing details of every job that has been processed since JobTracker started up - an invaluable management information resource that is enabling CGI to refine its processes and cut costs.

Peter Furlonge, CGI's MD, commented recently

"JobTracker has met its objectives fully, enabling us to reduce costs and manage production more accurately. Riverhall's software has proved highly reliable. The system has never had any major problems, and any minor issues were fixed rapidly by Riverhall. I would highly recommend Riverhall as a software developer."

Is Microsoft's Monopoly Coming to and End?

In 1991 (October 5th, to be precise), a young student from Helsinki posted to one of the Internet newsgroups about a 'pet project' he was working on. It was an operating system - a diminutive version of Unix he called 'Linux' - and he was giving it away free.

With this posting, Linus had started a small snowball rolling at the top of a large hill. At the bottom of the hill, oblivious to the danger above, Microsoft was still selling MS-DOS and Windows 3.1.

Twelve years later and with the free help of thousands of fellow enthusiasts, Linus's pet project has grown way beyond his original plans. Linux is now meets or exceeds the standards set by Unix.

An industry has grown around the free OS, dedicated to extending, packaging and distributing it.

IBM, with a strong hardware and consultancy business but no OS of its own since OS/2 sank below the weight of Windows NT, has backed Linux with force. They now support it on their mainframe computers and have run TV advertisements in favour of the upstart OS.

In recent years, Linux has creept quietly into the back rooms of businesses the world over. This is largely due to a free program called Samba which turns a Linux system into a highly efficient file and print server for a Windows network.

A recent benchmark showed that Linux with Samba required only one quarter of the computing power to do the same job as a Windows server. That is a considerable saving in hardware and licensing costs for any size of business.

The minimal outlay cost is very persuasive but consider also the administration costs. Windows has had well publicised stability and security problems with new vulnerabilities being discovered as often as weekly. Patching multiple servers is a time consuming irritation which delays real progress.

Linux is still blissfully free of such annoyances. There are far fewer security exposures and still no sign of a virus for Linux. Of course, this may change but given that anyone can download the full source code for Linux, the extensive peer review of program code helps to spot poor programming before it gets into a live system. Linux is extremely reliable.

The UK government now has a policy to consider open source alongside proprietary software

With free database management systems, email servers and web servers also available, Linux has most of the server market covered.

The desktop, however, has taken a little longer. People know Windows and Microsoft Office. Linux wasn't easy to use and had no equivalent office suite.

That has changed. Mammoth collaborations have produced desktops to rival Windows in flexibility and ease of use and an office suite which trumps MS Office in most departments.

The whole is now such a formidable combination that some very large business have started the conversion from Windows to Linux throughout. Recent announcements to do likewise have come from the governments of Germany, Brazil, Israel and China and the UK government is committed to consider open source alongside proprietary systems.

Microsoft has started taking the issue rather seriously. Its monopoly is being attacked although there's no obvious direction to launch a counter-attack. Instead it is frantically lobbying governments and businesses to persuade them of the benefits of Windows.

What makes this such an interesting battle is that there's really no one fighting for the Linux side. It is being adopted on merits alone.