Nuevo Mundo Seguros y Banco Comercial, Venezuela
Nuevo Mundo Insurance and Commercial Bank is located in Caracas, Venezuela, with about thirty branch offices across the country.
We started using Debian "potato" in early 2001, and upgraded to "woody". We have over a dozen servers (all Intel-based IBM servers from small to medium range SMP, hardware RAID, etc., a legacy UltraSparc Enterprise 5000, and a couple of Alpha Servers were replaced by them and now serve as backup/filestore running Debian too) handling all business critical activities from network infrastructure and centralized authentication (DHCP, BIND, OpenLDAP, IDS, internal Debian mirror, FTP serving, Netsaint, MRTG, etc.), electronic services (e-mail 1-1 and 1-many, Slash-based intranet, proxied access to the Internet with time-based restrictions) for over 400+ employees nation-wide, database holding (Oracle for the legacy business database, PostgreSQL and MySQL for new developments) and application development (we have about a dozen or so programmers migrating Oracle Forms applications into Perl+DBI CGIs and mod_perl modules).
I chose to start with SuSE in April 2000 only because it had Spanish User Manuals for my "newbie" tech staff. We have been "in production" with Linux since April 2000, and switched to Debian as soon as the rest of the tech staff got "up to date" and experienced enough to handle the administrator chores; the whole IT department (nine people) has switched to Debian (running testing/sid at the time). They wouldn't stand anything else now: reliability, manageability and software availability are the reasons.
We use free software for everything we can, we use proprietary software when there is no other choice (the only reason we're keeping Oracle installed is because it's hard to move our data out of it... for the time being :-) ).
