China’s biggest bank makes switch to Linux

Yup, this news about China’s biggest bank moving over to Linux is likely to be one of the biggest ’switch ads’ you will see in this life time! Being the bank is working at transitioning some 20,000 national branches over to the Linux OS, I’d say their IT team has their work cut out for them!

China’s biggest bank plans to deploy Linux on servers across its network of 20,000 national branches in a project that may be the biggest Linux deployment yet seen in China, according to an executive involved with the deal.

Under the terms of an agreement announced yesterday, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) plans to gradually roll out Turbolinux Inc.’s Turbolinux 7 DataServer operating system for all of its front-end banking operations over a three-year period. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

What makes this deal special is its size. With $640 billion in total assets, ICBC is China’s biggest bank, serving 100 million individuals and 8.1 million corporate accounts at more than 20,000 branch offices across China. When the project is completed, many of ICBC’s 390,000 employees will be accessing applications hosted on Linux servers on a daily basis.

ICBC chose Linux in part because its existing front-end applications, which were developed in-house, run on The SCO Group Inc.’s SCO Unix, and migrating them to Linux was determined to be an easier upgrade path than switching the applications to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system, according to Claude Zhou, general manager of Turbolinux China. [Read the rest]