With more than 1 million customers and an expanding presence in Europe, the insurance company needed to upgrade its core Web-serving platform to ensure it could handle a rapidly increasing number of customers. Quinn-direct Insurance chose Novell’s SLES over competitive Linux distributions due to the solution’s resilience, security and performance.

The company also cites a lower support burden for its IT personnel as a key driver for the deployment. All of the company’s internet-based activity is supported by one operating system now – freeing up highly skilled employees to work on other projects.

The company undertook intensive testing to find the right platform to support its web-based business looking in particular at integration with IBM WebSphere and the ability to handle very heavy loads. Securelinx provided hands-on Linux expertise and support to the project which took three-months from start to finish.

Commenting on the deployment, CJ Johnston, IT Server & Desktop Manager, Quinn-direct Insurance said:

“We’ve already started to see a healthy return on investment from our standardisation on Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server…The website is considerably more responsive for end users and we now typically handle four times as many quotes as before. Automated XML requests from partner websites are completed and returned within seconds.”

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is one of the leading Linux server distributions on the market today. Novell’s Linux server solutions give businesses greater flexibility, are scalable, inexpensive and easy to maintain.