"We have six servers instead of two so it does involve more support effort [but] the Unix guys transitioned easily to Red Hat with some training," she said. "And we are achieving a 20 percent saving. We were heading for 30 to 40 percent, but 20 is still a good result."

With one-third of all chickens eaten in Australia supplied by Steggles, Bartter's transaction volumes are not -trivial.

"We are a national company which distributes 2.4 million chickens a week," Endacott said. "We have 3,500 customers, 4,500 inventory items, more than 100,000 sales items per week, and distribute 600,000 cartons, so scalability was a must and cost is always a consideration."

Endacott said most of the challenges so far were around the Oracle applications.

Cybersource CEO Con Zymaris also detailed a Unix to Linux migration which took place at Melbourne's Chisholm Education College which has some 37,000 students .The main backend was Oracle 8i on HP-UX, the hardware cost was set to quadruple and adding necessary disks would cost around $50,000.