IPBrick Redefines Open Source Usability and Manageability – IDC Whitepaper

W H I T E P A P E R

I P B r i c k R e d e f i n e s O p e n S o u r c e U s a b i l i t y a n d M a n a g e a b i l i t y Sponsored by: IPBrick International

Chris Ingle Romain Fouchereau Gabriel Coimbra January 2009

E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y

Faced with the twin demands of continuing to support business processes while reducing costs, CIOs are evaluating technologies that offer new ways of approaching IT challenges.

Open source technology and appliances are both attractive ways of meeting these challenges. IDC interviewed a group of companies and public sector organisations that have implemented IPBrick solutions. Among the key findings of this research are:

Lower cost is a key reason why companies are looking for an alternative to proprietary solutions. However, this is not just lower software license cost, you should also look at factors such as ease of support and implementation, speed of deployment and the benefits of having systems that users can manage better.

Integrating IT and communications is a key savings area and offers companies the opportunity to improve their working processes. One of the main features of IPBrick is unified communications, which is a central reason why companies are evaluating the product.

For organisations with specialised requirements it can be costly to engage with software developers and resellers to customize products. IPBrick and the iPortalMais organisation offer customisation facilities.

An integrated application platform reduces the cost of managing business applications and should increase the reliability of the system.

Overall we found that companies are gaining these cost, flexibility and reliability benefits. iPortalMais can continue to deliver these benefits by increasing the skills in its channel and widening the application portfolio.

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M E T H O D O L O G Y

IDC interviewed 10 organisations that had evaluated, tested and deployed IPBrick products at their sites. These organisations were selected by IDC from a list of customers provided by IPBrick.

Companies were questioned using a structured questionnaire designed by IDC. This questionnaire was used to help IDC understand the technical and commercial advantages and disadvantages of IPBrick.

The results of these interviews have been combined with IDC's research into datacenter and client management to produce a comprehensive report on IPBrick.

W H A T I N F R A S T R U C T U R E C O N C E R N S N E E D T O B E A D D R E S S E D ?

Our research with CIOs indicates that they are dealing with a complex, interrelated set of issues around their infrastructure.

As Figure 1 shows, there is a range of technological requirements that cause particular challenges in infrastructure.

F I G U R E 1

T h e C I O ' s C h a l l e n g e

As CIO, what will be your biggest challenge in the next 6–18 months?

2.3%

4.9%

5.9%

7.9%

7.9%

9.2%

10.2%

10.9%

14.8%

16.8%

25.3%

30.9%

8.6%

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35%

Lack of boardroom attention

Legacy systems

Increasing demand for Web and collaborative apps

Lack of interest in IT strategy

Drive business innovation

Decreasing budgets

Business alignment

Getting qualified IT and communications staff

Deliver flexible IT solutions

Compliance

Integrate IT and communications

Security/business continuity

Other challenges

2.3%

4.9%

5.9%

7.9%

7.9%

9.2%

10.2%

10.9%

14.8%

16.8%

25.3%

30.9%

8.6%

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35%

Lack of boardroom attention

Legacy systems

Increasing demand for Web and collaborative apps

Lack of interest in IT strategy

Drive business innovation

Decreasing budgets

Business alignment

Getting qualified IT and communications staff

Deliver flexible IT solutions

Compliance

Integrate IT and communications

Security/business continuity

Other challenges

Source: IDC, 2009

©2009 IDC # 3

Among the most critical are:

Securing infrastructure and ensuring resilience. As organisations become more dependent on IT, they need to ensure that their infrastructure is available and ready to meet business demands.

Integrating IT and communications is critical. The move to digitise information is now being followed by the digitisation of communications. Integrating IT and communications allows organizations to reduce their costs and allows teams in the organization, its customers and the supply chain to work more effectively together.

Compliance has a number of implications. For infrastructure, it requires organisations to have a flexible server and storage architecture that supports data retention and retrieval.

These requirements have been common for many years. What is becoming critical is meeting these requirements in a market in which cost pressure is even more acute than usual and where there is an urgent need to reevaluate traditional IT investments and working practices to drastically lower the cost of IT, while retaining the benefits.

T H E I P B R I C K P R O P O S I T I O N

iPortalMais, the company behind IPBrick, has a long history of developing customised solutions to address particular customer requirements. The company's origins in 2000 and 2001 were in developing a document management solution that ran on open source software. Using open source enabled iPortalMais to lower the cost of its overall solution and allowed more customisation than would be possible without open source.

T h e O p e n S o u r c e C h a l l e n g e : S k i l l s a n d F a m i l i a r i t y

As many developers have found, open source, particularly the Linux operating environment, seems to be a very attractive platform for applications. It offers a number of benefits:

Lower cost. Companies running open source should be saving on their software license costs.

Availability of source code and reassurance of availability. Most organisations do not want to develop operating systems and tools. However, access to the code and the assurance that the code will be available should the code developer not be in business are obvious benefits of open source.

Integration. Integration is a critical issue for a complex solution stack, whether built on open source or proprietary code or a mix of the two. Most organisations will look for developers to do this integration, and availability of code enables developers to debug integrated software stacks.

While open source is attractive for developers, IT staff and systems integrators often don't have positive experiences of open source, except for certain applications such as Web serving through Apache or Web browsing using Firefox. Those implementing open source solutions have two major issues with the environment:

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Familiarity. The majority of architects, administrators and users have experience of the Microsoft Windows platform. Relatively few have familiarity with Linux as a general application deployment platform. Although it might not be difficult for staff to learn the features of the platform, they may not want to do so or may not have the time available to familiarise themselves with the environment.

Skills. Most organisations don't have technical skills in configuring Linux. Although Linux is relatively easy to deploy it can require more knowledge to configure systems than for other platforms. Often Linux skills attract a price premium compared to Windows skills to reflect this additional complexity.

As a result of these issues, Linux adoption for many common business applications has not been as widespread as many organisations would have liked.

G e t t i n g O p e n S o u r c e O u t o f t h e N i c h e — H o w D o e s I P B r i c k D e a l W i t h T h e s e I s s u e s ?

IPBrick deals with the issues of familiarity and skills by optimising Linux-based systems so that these issues are not presented to the user or administrator.

IPBrick products simplify the implementation and administration of IT through a number of mechanisms:

A straightforward interface makes management easier. IPBrick has an easy to use interface that allows non-technical staff to start using services provided by the IPBrick. A visual interface makes it easy for those not familiar with Linux to quickly configure the product.

Speed of installation. IPBrick's user interface and automated installation procedures make it a simple process to quickly install IPBrick. Combined with the ease of installation mentioned above, IT staff and non-technical people can quickly get functionality into their organisation.

Ease of scaling. Scalability is a critical challenge, with IT managers looking to add capacity quickly and as needed. IPBrick can operate in multiple roles in a corporate network (master, slave, in a cluster, or as a network resource); many of the organisations interviewed for this study saw scalability as being critical.

Propagating configuration information from the interface. A major challenge for traditional open source implementations is that different application packages require the user to enter appropriate configuration data for each package. IPBrick simplifies this process by having the administrator enter the data once and then having the data propagated throughout the system.

Integrated network services and applications. Key to ensuring IPBrick's usability is the pre-integration of the stack and integration with other iPortalMais and third-party applications. This allows IT staff to quickly deploy a full solution stack for each application with reduced time to test the system and ensure that the integration is successful. Over time iPortalMais is adding more integrated applications and services to its products.

Converging IT and communications. Earlier in this paper, we highlighted the importance of converged IT and communications. iPortalMais is developing a

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concept it calls unified communications over IP (UCoIP), which uses only open standards to carry out this convergence.

Disaster recovery is supported. iPortalMais offers a USB stick that allows recovery of the applications, licensing rights and configuration information for an IPBrick installation. This can be used in the event of hardware failure for easy and quick recovery.

Ease of support and use of iPortalMais's development teams. As our interviews with IPBrick customers show, one of the benefits customers can derive from IPBrick is reduced support cost. Customers that require customisation of their product or more advanced support can use the iPortalMais development team to assist in adapting the product to their needs.

I P B r i c k P r o d u c t R e v i e w

There are two design points that offer IPBrick customers the features needed to get out of the open source niche discussed in the previous section. Firstly, greater reliability and scaling is gained through the modular nature of IPBrick and the propagation of configuration information either in the system in standalone or in a distributed IPBrick environment. Secondly, the range of applications services available on IPBrick allows easy set up of many of the features that businesses require; this combines with the ability to add new features and applications either alone or through collaboration with iPortalMais.

IPBrick uses open source technology and open standards to ensure compatibility with other parts of the infrastructure, namely Windows workstations and servers, Macintosh workstations and other Linux workstations and servers.

The IPBrick product portfolio is changing through the addition of new integrated service applications services that aim to add functionalities and features while preserving the benefits listed above. This short outline of products should not therefore be taken as conclusive.

IPBrick.IC is provided as a software solution (server operating system) that companies can load onto a supported x86 server. It integrates the IPBrick.I and IPBrick.C functionalities and includes the following modules:

IPBrick.I is the intranet component of the IPBrick solution stack. It provides collaboration tools (email, address book, diary), domain controller (for Windows, Linux and Macintosh workstations), file server, print server, terminal server, database server and data backup. It also supports business applications such as CRM from SugarCRM; document management from iPortalDoc and business management from Gestix, among other applications being ported (specially for IPBrick for Oracle version).

IPBrick.C is the communications part of the IPBrick solution stack. It provides mail relay, Proxy (HTTP and FTP), Web services, telephony services (voice, video, fax and SMS serving), IM, and communications security (firewall, VPN, content filtering, and IDS).

The IPBrick.IC software can be installed on several servers, allowing the implementation of quite complex distributed architectures. We can find IPBrick servers with the IPBrick.I module in master and slave topologies, IPBrick.C

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module in client mode, all managed simply from the IPBrick.I master. It is also possible to install IPBrick servers in cluster topologies either for high-availability or load balance.

iPortalMais offers several solutions for companies looking for a preinstalled hardware and software appliance:

IPBrick.GT provides an appliance that replaces or integrates with old PBX and implements a unified communications central (following the UCoIP concept).

IPBrick.KAV provides a preinstalled security appliance using Kaspersky Labs security software.

IPBrick.SOHO implements an all in one server for small businesses and includes the three main functions of IPBrick in one appliance: intranet, security and unified communications. This makes it the perfect solution for companies that want more than a small pbx and a router.

IPBrick.SCHOOL includes the communications and intranet features of IPBrick customised for schools, with dual simultaneous terminal sessions (Windows and Linux) and course management functionality.

IPBrick was originally developed for Linux Debian distribution, but today we can find it also on top of Ubuntu Linux server distribution or Oracle Enterprise Linux. With this achievement, the IPBrick solution shows how independent it can be from a base Linux distribution, providing exactly the same functionality, look and feel over three major Linux distributions.

The next section of this paper discusses how customers are using IPBrick and provides case studies and advice on what went well and issues that potential users of IPBrick should have in mind when considering the product.

I P B R I C K F R O M T H E C U S T O M E R ' S P O I N T O F V I E W

The case studies below give a detailed account of how IPBrick is being used in practice. There are a number of general conclusions that we have drawn from working with customers using IPBrick:

1. Use for small and large organisations. We found that IPBrick was being used in both large and smaller organisations and for a wide range of uses. In smaller organisations, IPBrick often provided the intranet and communications functions. In larger organisations use was split between particular applications (for example, the Telefónica application discussed below) and for branch office enablement.

2. Cost reductions. In both large and small organizations, the attraction of IPBrick was that it offered considerable possibilities for savings. We saw those in four main areas:

Software license cost savings. Using open source, companies were able to reduce their software license costs compared with the alternatives considered.

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Ease of maintenance and support and reduction in support costs. The use of a Web interface to enable non-technical staff without Linux skills to deploy and manage applications on Linux created savings in IT configuration and management. The ongoing support cost is reduced through reduction in cost of supporting the hardware and application.

Cost of communications. Moving to an UCoIP environment reduced the cost of voice communications. For some organisations this was the major area of saving.

Speed of deployment. Standardization of deployment and support, particularly when extended to ISV-specific versions (e.g. Oracle, SugarCRM for CRM, iPortalDoc for content management and openXpertya for ERP), made the return on investment faster than the traditional development, test, and deployment cycle.

3. Scaling. IPBrick users can easily add another node to scale their infrastructure in response to increased application and user demand.

4. Ease of working with IPBrick. For organisations that need customisation IPBrick is able to respond to different client requests. IPortalMais is quickly able to add new functionality, particularly when compared with larger IT infrastructure providers.

C h a l l e n g e s

As with every solution, IPBrick customers face challenges in operating their infrastructure. The main problems we noted in this research were to do with breadth and experience of the channel in implementing more complex IPBrick-based solutions. iPortalMais will need to focus on improving channel skills as it grows the business.

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C A S E S T U D I E S : I P B R I C K I N P R A C T I C E This section provides details of the experiences of the customers interviewed for this paper.

Á g u a s d o D o u r o e P a i v a

T A B L E 1

C o m p a n y B a c k g r o u n d : Á g u a s d o D o u r o e P a i v a

Country Portugal

Industry Utilities

Revenues (FY07) €33 million


Employees at site (FY07) 50

IT staff at site (FY07) 4

Primary objective Reduce existing communications costs between the company's branches

Key benefits reported Reduced costs, ease of management

Source: Aguas do Douro Paiva, IDC, 2009

Introduction

Águas do Douros (AdDP) was formed in 1995 in order to construct the collection, management and supply of drinking water resources to the Porto district. The company is 51% privately owned, the remaining 49% held by the 18 municipalities that it serves.

In addition to its continued construction of the water supply system, in 2005 AdDP began to build a system to monitor the infrastructure of its water supply system (reservoirs, pumping stations, treatment plants etc.) as well as control it remotely.

Challenges

The company has five branches in Portugal, and the communications infrastructure between the branches was proving to be costly to run. In addition, the system required dedicated operators to manage it.

Solution

Following an assessment of all the options available to it, AdDP decided on the IPBrick product set based on the comparative inexpensiveness and ease of management. Selecting nine products, among them IPBrick.IC and IPBrick GT, AdDP was able to deploy the entire solution within a week, which included the preparations required to identify the connections between the buildings and use of systems to be locally configured.

©2009 IDC # 9

Since its installation over five years ago, there have been no major issues with the running of the solution and very little maintenance is required, the most AdDP has to do is perform updates.

B e a r C o m — A n S T T T e l e c o m C o m p a n y

T A B L E 2

C o m p a n y B a c k g r o u n d : B e a r C o m

Country Brazil

Industry Telecommunications



Primary objective To connect its two branches via the Internet

Key benefits reported Very little maintenance required, resulting in cost savings

Source: BearCom, IDC, 2009

Introduction

The BearCom name is not currently familiar in the Brazilian market space; at present the company is trading under the name STT Telecom Sociedad Técnica de Telecomunicações Limitada.

Challenges

BearCom was looking for a solution that would allow it to connect the branches of STT in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro through the Internet.

Not a customer of iPortalMais and unfamiliar with the IPBrick name, BearCom was introduced to the product at a road show run by its reseller. Run on a Linux platform, the product was attractive to BearCom because of the initial savings that could be made by purchasing a Linux-based application in comparison with other applications. In addition to the cost savings, the IPBrick product was user-friendly.

Solution

IPBrick.I and IPBrick.C were initially tested on PCs before being deployed on a Dell server. The initial version 4.0 was installed on a plug and play basis, taking just 10–15 minutes to install. The current version 5.0 took a little longer (20–25 minutes) but essentially was just as easy, and the transfer from one server to another was a simple transfer using an external USB disk.

Except for upgrades and tweaking configurations, the solution requires little maintenance and the company has made savings in that area. Support for the product has been outsourced to its reseller.

The main advantages of the tool are ease of deployment and the management interface. STT has had very few problems with IPBrick. The initial product deployment of the telecommunications function on the tool was not very functional, primarily because the telco aspect was not a main focus of the product set. However, with the

10 # ©2009 IDC

latest version (5.0), BearCom/STT has found the quality of the telecommunications functions have improved substantially.

C a m c a r

T A B L E 3

C o m p a n y B a c k g r o u n d : C a m c a r

Country Germany

Industry Professional Services



Primary objective Simplify current infrastructure and improve access to the system.

Key benefits reported None

Source: Camcar, IDC, 2009

Introduction

Located in Germany, Camcar specialises in the rental of professional equipment for film and video production.

Challenges

With limited internal knowledge of IT, the in-house IT infrastructure had been built on an ad-hoc basis over the years, and was being maintained by an external IT services provider. Camcar's existing IT infrastructure was proving to be difficult to maintain and as there were plans for the company to expand to a new site, it seemed like a good opportunity for Camcar to make changes to its IT infrastructure to make it more efficient.

In addition, the company was looking to consolidate its many login requirements and reduce its overall running costs.

Solution

Camcar was introduced to IPBrick through its current IT provider, reviewing the balance of cost vs. performance; the product range was very attractive. The company selected the VoIP, virus scanning, and single sign-on aspects of the IPBrick products to deploy.

The entire installation has suffered from a number of problems and delays and took six months to deploy. The system was migrated step-by-step, first transitioning the user database, then data, then database to separate server before finally moving it all back onto an IPBrick server.

Camcar has had a series of problems with the IPBrick products that continue to be an issue and are yet to be resolved, these have included:

VoIP voice quality and reliability

©2009 IDC # 11

Domain migration issues

Network printing

Despite the above faults, Camcar saw benefits in its email and AV systems that were running particularly well. In addition, the issues with multiple logins had been resolved and the single sign-on was deployed without problems.

C e n t r e H o s p i t a l i e r S t . M a r t i n L o u i s C o n s t a n t F l e m i n g

T A B L E 4

C o m p a n y B a c k g r o u n d : C e n t r e H o s p i t a l i e r S t . M a r t i n L o u i s C o n s t a n t F l e m i n g

Country Guadeloupe

Industry Health care



Primary objective Provide Internet access and access to email online

Key benefits reported Plug and play solution

Source: Centre Hospitalier, IDC, 2009

Introduction

Based in Guadeloupe, the St. Martin Louis Constant Fleming Hospital is a part of the Fédération Hospitalière de France.

The hospital has 300 employees at the site offering healthcare and assistance to the Caribbean community.

Challenges

The hospital was looking to upgrade the facilities in-house with the aim of setting up its own Internet solution, which included its own domain name, Internet access, and access to email/Webmail. With only two IT personnel to service 300 employees, the solution had to be easy to both use and administer.

Solution

IPBrick was brought to the hospital's attention by its reseller. In addition to the recommendation, the product was chosen based on its price, especially as the solution came in far cheaper than any other solution evaluated.

As only a very simple solution was required for its needs, IPBrick's Webmail v4.3 was selected and deployed by the reseller. The project itself was indeed a small one, requiring minimal set up, and deployed within 10 minutes. No downtime or interruption was experienced.

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The Webmail continues to operate as expected and no major problems have been experienced since its original deployment (December 2006). The hospital is expecting to upgrade to Webmail v5.0 shortly.

C e n t r o H o s p i t a l a r d o P o r t o

T A B L E 5

C o m p a n y B a c k g r o u n d : C e n t r o H o s p i t a l a r d o P o r t o

Country Portugal

Industry Healthcare

Revenues (FY07) NA



Primary objective Implement a secure domain and LAN

Key benefits reported Increased reliability; reduced redundancy; scalable infrastructure; cost control

Source: Centro Hospitalar do Porto, IDC, 2009

Challenges

Centro Hospitalar do Porto was undergoing an upgrade of its infrastructure and was looking to implement a domain, a structured LAN and group policies to govern the system.

Solution

IPBrick was chosen as it offered an integrated solution based on open source and offered redundancy at a reasonable cost. A total of 14 IPBrick products were installed, including I, C, and iPortalDoc.

Since the deployment, network problems have been reduced substantially, and users have greater access to services. The primary benefits measured by the hospital are:

Greater reliability

Scalable infrastructure

Cost vs. performance

©2009 IDC # 13

E f a c e c G r o u p

T A B L E 6

C o m p a n y B a c k g r o u n d : E f a c e c G r o u p

Country Portugal

Industry Manufacturing

Revenues (FY07) €440.3 million


IT staff at site (FY07) 60–70

Primary objective Provide a connection to each of the Efacec branches

Key benefits reported Ease of installation, easy to support, global integration, recovery abilities

Source: Efacec, IDC, 2009

Introduction

The Efacec Group is composed of a series of companies that manufacture electrical equipment and offer services. With its primary headquarters in Portugal, the company employs around 3,000 people and is established in over 50 countries worldwide.

Challenges

With offices throughout the world and continued expansion of the company, Efacec was looking for a solution to connect each of its foreign branches via a simple link of the Internet.

Solution

The company was introduced to IPBrick by word of mouth, at the time that Efacec was seeking the solution there were very few offerings available on the market that were suitable for its requirements. The IPBrick solution worked in a global context and the relationship that it built with IPBrick encouraged the company to choose its products. Cost was also a beneficial factor in the decision-making process, especially as it was within budget.

All of the IPBrick products were deployed: IPBrick.I and IPBrick.C. The process was a simple plug and play CD, which then required some configuration and finally adaptation of Efacec and IPBrick contexts. The first deployment was in Algeria and took one day, but with additional experience in further deployments this has decreased over time.

14 # ©2009 IDC

Some of the benefits achieved since the deployment of IPBrick include:

Flexibility in resources — The remote access solution has allowed Efacec to more readily move and reallocate staff where necessary

Easy installation

Easy to support (because of the Linux OS)

Recovery abilities

Global integration of branch infrastructure

E L E C T R O S A T

T A B L E 7

C o m p a n y B a c k g r o u n d : E L E C T R O S A T

Country France




Primary objective Simplify current communications infrastructure

Key benefits reported Support service; ease of deployment; backup solution

Source: Electrosat IDC, 2009

Introduction ELECTROSAT provides telephony services primarily through its Taxiphone teleboutique, a service offered mainly for overseas calls.

Challenges Having a mixed communications environment built up over the years with several vendors, ELECTROSAT was having difficulties in maintaining the infrastructure. Costs were escalating and response times were slow. ELECTROSAT was looking to simplify the communications connections it maintains with operators, clients, routing, statistics and VoIP.

Solution ELECTROSAT decided to implement all of the IPBrick products, replacing the existing infrastructure for a uniform solution. Deploying the solution using in-house IT resources was a quick and easy process, a matter of plug and play. From making the initial contact with IPBrick to building up the required specifications, including a demonstration, took less than a week; the product itself was up and running within five minutes. As a result of the quick installation and easy migration, ELECTROSAT experienced no real downtime.

©2009 IDC # 15

Since deployment, the solution continues to perform as expected, and being supported directly by IPBrick has provided ELECTROSAT with the backup it needs. Some of the benefits noted by ELECTROSAT include:

Simplified infrastructure

Support service

Ease of deployment

Back up solution

S O D E C I A

T A B L E 8

C o m p a n y B a c k g r o u n d : S O D E C I A

Country Brazil

Industry Manufacturing




Primary objective Replace the existing communications infrastructure, which provided very little bandwidth at ever-increasing costs

Key benefits reported Ease of maintenance; ease of deployment; direct support from IPBrick; reduced costs in running communications

Source: SODECIA, IDC, 2009

Introduction SODECIA is an industrial components supplier with headquarters in Portugal. The company develops and produces small and medium stampings, generic sub-assemblies, welding assembles, structural assemblies, seat frames, pedal boxes and hand brakes among other automotive requirements. It has approximately 1,000 employees distributed across North and South America, France, Italy and Germany. In the last year, the company has continued to expand in South America with acquisitions in Argentina and Brazil.

Challenges With five branches in Brazil and having to work with the existing infrastructure, SODECIA was facing increasingly high communications costs. The inherited infrastructures from its acquisitions were placing serious limitations on the existing infrastructure, resulting in expensive communications costs and little capacity to show for it.

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Solution An IPBrick solution was initially rolled out in the Portugal office. To ensure that the deployment was uniform, SODECIA chose IPBrick.GT. In order to avoid any major downtime, the solution was deployed gradually throughout the Brazilian offices. The process itself was simple and as the solution had been deployed once already, SODECIA was already familiar with the product. For the user, the IPBrick solution has had little impact, but for the IT administrator, the easy set up and user-friendly interface has made the solution easy to manage. For SODECIA, the primary named benefits of IPBrick have been:

Ease of maintenance

Ease of deployment — plug and play

Direct support from IPBrick

Reduced costs in running communications

S w i f t a i r

T A B L E 9

C o m p a n y B a c k g r o u n d : S w i f t a i r

Country Spain

Industry Transportation



Primary objective Replace obsolete technology

Key benefits reported Increased functionality; cost effective

Source: Swift Air, IDC, 2009

Introduction Swiftair is a private airline based in Spain providing both cargo and passenger flights. Originally flying in Spain, the company has expanded its operations throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The airline also has an aviation company based in Greece and a handling company in Morocco.

Challenges Following many years of use, Swiftair was looking to update its switchboard, whose technology had become obsolete.

Solution The IPBrick product was chosen as a very innovative product capable of covering a wide range of functionality. Cost was also a factor, and was found to be very competitive. At the time of writing, the full deployment for Swiftair was still in the process of completion. A pilot version of the solution had been implemented by IPBrick and was

©2009 IDC # 17

in testing. The company was so happy with this that it intended to migrate its system to the pilot solution. Despite not having a fully operational solution, Swiftair believes that the IPBrick product is very innovative and cost-effective. The solution provides much functionality suitable for a midsized company and helps save costs in licenses and hardware.

T e l e f ó n i c a R e s e a r c h & D e v e l o p m e n t

T A B L E 1 0

C o m p a n y B a c k g r o u n d : T e l e f ó n i c a R e s e a r c h & D e v e l o p m e n t

Country Spain




Primary objective Expand storage requirements for a Telefónica service

Key benefits reported Ease of recovery

Source: Telefónica, IDC, 2009

Introduction Telefónica Research & Development is the innovation company of the Telefónica Group. Owned 100% by Telefónica, the subsidiary was created in 1988 with the aim of strengthening the group's competitiveness through technological innovation. It is one of the largest private R&D companies in Spain, in terms of both activities and resources, as well as the number of staff employed. Telefónica R&D provides communications services for businesses and consumers, including prepaid services, ring-back tones services, billing information, missed calls and IVR services. Service platforms have been a major area of innovation for Telefónica R&D, where new platform concepts are essential to the development of services with high differentiation value.

Challenges Telefónica R&D was looking to create additional functionality for a service that it was developing and looking to expand. As a result, it needed to expand its storage capacity to make it a viable service.

Solution Following an evaluation of a selection of products, an IPBrick system was chosen for deployment at the Madrid headquarters, primarily for its recovery capabilities and ease of installation. In order to ensure consistency and that the systems worked, each of the servers was configured and the IPBrick solution installed centrally, before being redeployed in 20 local branches scattered across Spain. There have been some issues that resulted from network installation at some locations, due to a lack of networking capabilities. However, this wasn't an IPBrick problem, but it provided the modifications quickly. Despite being a little more

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expensive than Telefónica R&D had expected, the IPBrick product has offered a very easy to use recovery solution.

C O N C L U S I O N S

IPBrick offers customers options for both network infrastructure and for their application infrastructure. As the case studies in this paper demonstrate, it provides IT directors with a set of services that are frequently more cost-competitive than the alternatives.

iPortalMais needs to continue the development of application-specific IPBrick products. Companies that are looking to build out their infrastructure should find these products to be an easier and quicker to deploy solution than assembling from general-purpose systems.

Finally, many customers interviewed for this paper had been introduced to the product by their service providers or IT resellers. Customers should challenge their reseller to ensure that they are being offered open source and appliance products.

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IPBrick Redefines Open Source Usability and Manageability – IDC Whitepaper

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Transcript of IPBrick Redefines Open Source Usability and Manageability – IDC Whitepaper