The debate over the pro's and con's of Open Source Software continues to rage, but some companies have no choice.

Decades of geopolitical turmoil have resulted in a number of countries being listed as "Globally Embargoed Countries". Simplistically this is a US ruling that outlaws the export of most US developed technologies to these countries. In practice local companies in these countries blatantly flaunt the law and use illegal copies of US software at will, but multi-nationals run the risk of severe legal action in the US if they deploy common IT products.

A very large multi-national company was faced with this dilemma when opening new offices in two GEC Countries. The options were to risk breaking GEC rules, run an antiquated IT infrastructure, or see if a complete, modern, enterprise IT infrastructure could be built using entirely Open Source products.

They chose the latter, and the project was so successful that there were repercussions for the infrastructure in non-GEC countries. This presentation will tell the story.

The presentation will be business focused and mostly non-technical in nature. It will be of interest to managers who are interested in hearing experiences of Open Source software in real-world production environments.

With a background as a Cray systems programmer, Andy moved to the Netherlands in 1995 to work for Shell Research, and then founded Competa IT BV in 1997.

Competa is a company specialising in providing Open Source, Linux, Unix and Storage solutions to large and multinational corporations. Competa won the 1998 Anglo-Dutch award for Business Enterprise, and was a finalist in the 2001 European Awards for the Spirit of Enterprise.

Andy is a member of USENIX, the Systems Administrators Guild, the British Computer Society, the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Directors.