French Ministry of Equipment chooses Mandrakesoft to migrate office and infrastructure servers to Linux

(Auszug aus der Pressemitteilung)

Moreno Valley, California; Paris, France; July 9th, 2004 – The French

Ministry of Equipment’s migration to Linux project is replacing 1,500
office and infrastructure Microsoft Windows NT servers with
Mandrakelinux Corporate servers. Mandrakesoft, the premier European
Linux player, was also chosen for deployment, training and support for
its Linux solution.

The French Ministry of Equipment has approximately 100,000 agents,
located throughout France, in several services: central
administration, local administration, technical services and
navigation services. With 160 remote locations, including 102 local
administrations, the Ministry’s IT infrastructure is composed of more
than 60,000 workstations and 2,000 Microsoft Windows NT servers near
end of useful life.

The Ministry of Equipment’s central administration for IT (DCSI) is
managing the migration’s technological drive, in order to guarantee
the information system’s coherency and the use of state of the art
technologies. Under its control, the Linux server migration project
began in November 2003. It will continue through the end of 2005, to
ensure a progressive deployment at the national scale.

The migration was established in terms of technical and organizational
requirements. In order to meet the project’s needs, two specific Linux
distributions based on Mandrakelinux Corporate Server were developed.

To benefit from technology monitoring, technical assistance and
personalized training, the Ministry has also subscribed to the
Mandrakesoft Corporate Club.

With Mandrakesoft, the Ministry chose an alternative to proprietary
software, and this is a significant step towards technological
independence and the guarantee of enduring public standards for its
information systems. This large scale project is in concordance with
the French government’s intent to promote technologies based on public
standards, to open public markets to more competition, and also to
reduce IT costs.

François Bancilhon, CEO of Mandrakesoft, declared: “We are delighted
to see Mandrakesoft’s work in terms of server products and services
crystallize in such a large project. This is the proof that
Mandrakesoft solutions now fit perfectly with enterprise scale
requirements. This project is our first achievement among several
similar new ones, and is a sign of Mandrakesoft’s dynamic growth”.

Mandrakesoft