Community for Open Source Promotion Forums

[Muhammad Shoaib]

When Backcountry.com, an outdoor sporting goods retailer, was looking for shopping cart software, it picked an open source application called Interchange. It worked so well that the company began an enterprise-wide migration to open source software that has Linux running everywhere, from the servers to the desktops.

Right from the beginning, Backcountry.com used Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It brought in one of Red Hat's consultants, Dave Jenkins, to help find shopping cart software that was open enough for the company's needs, but that didn't come with an outrageous price tag. "I set up their initial game plans for them," says Jenkins, who eventually left Red Hat to become Backcountry.com's chief technology officer. "They were looking around and realized there weren't any good ecommerce engines with reasonable price ranges and flexibility -- the flexibility was almost more important than the money." For Backcountry, flexibility was synonymous with openness.

Backcountry.com got its start in 1998, right before the "dot-com bomb," according to Jenkins, and management was able to predict the coming market implosion. In order for Backcountry.com to survive, its infrastructure had to be open -- "they had to have the code for themselves, had to be able to 'hack themselves,' to implement whatever screwball idea they might come up with," so that Backcountry.com wouldn't risk losing information stored in proprietary applications that couldn't be simply lifted out of the code, if the company decided it didn't want to use that vendor anymore.

Jenkins has continued to find ways to implement open source solutions throughout Backcountry's infrastructure. The latest change is the launch of the Zimbra open source Web-based collaboration suite. Backcountry is using Zimbra for mail, collaboration, and calendaring. Previously the company's email was served by a remote ISP. "We officially rolled out Zimbra six weeks ago to the entire company," Jenkins says. "We were one of the early beta testers." Backcountry.com didn't need collaboration in the early days, but the company has grown from "40 people in a small garage to 250 people in two locations," Jenkins says.

"We were playing with Open-Xchange for five or six weeks and we were just about to contract with one of the consulting firms to do a roll out." Jenkins hesitated at the last minute because he felt that Open-Xchange was "just copying Microsoft Exchange. Why go with a platform that's copying an eight-year-old piece of crap?" he says. "Why not go with something new and sexy?" He and the Backcountry.com staff decided to look a bit further, found Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Jenkins liked the AJAX-based interactivity of Zimbra. Backcountry began testing it with 25 users, who also fell in love with some of the same features that lured Jenkins, such as the interactive calendar that renders pages with one mouse click and "zimlet" plugins that let users do on-the-fly Wikipedia and Yahoo! Maps searches.

Now that Jenkins has finished rolling out Zimbra to the entire company, he's working on integrating it with Interchange, to provide even more readily accessible information for staff members to collaborate on, such as customer management and accounting and invoice information.

Just about every Backcountry.com employee is running Fedora Linux on the desktop -- 50 workstations in the warehouse and 60 in the call center. "We have a policy that any machine replaced doesn't get Windows put back on it," Jenkins says. "It's Linux migration by attrition." Jenkins manages support for an inconsistent mix of desktop operating systems by utilizing the vast skills of his IT staff, who are well-versed in both Windows and Linux environments. The transition has been invisible to the users, he says, because all the server and desktop applications are accessed via a browser. "As long as I can get a browser window we're good to go."

Jenkins plans to continue implementing open source solutions wherever he can at Backcountry.com. He says that the company has saved millions of dollars in upfront software costs and recurring licensing fees. "We pay Red Hat for Enterprise Linux, but that's my only real cost. We're always looking at open source. If [an application meets] a core competency, we find it, adapt it, and bolt it in."

Original Article at: http://www.linux.com/feature/53628