INSURANCE giant Allianz Australia expects to save more than $1 million by switching from Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Linux for key applications.
The move involves dropping the traditional Wintel (Windows-Intel) platform for a virtualised IBM mainframe running on Linux.
The migration is part of a $4m technology infrastructure overhaul to match Allianz's growing business requirements.
Further cost savings will come from bringing in house some tasks outsourced to CSC.
"Our data centre was running out of power and we couldn't add any more servers to the infrastructure," Allianz Australia infrastructure and operations head Peter Rowe said.
"We started looking at virtualisation as one way of overcoming that problem and elected to revamp the data centre. We were also feeling quite constrained running (IBM) WebSphere applications on the Wintel platform and there was not enough flexibility to grow with Windows."
