Thrifty's IT manager Michael Morton said the transformation initiative began about eight months ago when its Red Hat Linux and SCO Unix systems were becoming outdated.

"All servers were falling behind and we were hit by a rootkit two years ago and that was a catalyst for wanting things to be up to date as possible," Morton said.

Thrifty's in-house Linux administrator did not have the skills to overcome some of the issues the company had so it contracted Sydney-based open source consultancy Solutions First to spearhead to modernization project.

"We wanted to get car the rental system, Cars Plus, onto a new set of servers," Morton said. "In doing so we looked at Solutions First and one of its recommendations was to move away from Red Hat to Ubuntu Linux, which we did."

The Cars Plus reporting software, IQ Reports, had support for it stopped with Linux kernel 2.4 releases so Solutions First did some "fancy footwork" to enable it to run on kernel 2.6 systems.