Kempe said the ideas and philosophies of open source is beginning to influence purchasing at Thrifty.

"The idea of vendor lock-in is becoming more of a priority because they have been burnt in the past," he said. "That's the reason why people choose open source. You also have freedom as a service provider to change the solutions you offer. We are not locked into recommending one product [so] we can offer better service."

On the new printing system, Kempe said Solutions First used Ghostscript and Mozilla to render the application in HTML and then print it out which ended up costing one-third of comparable proprietary software "without the limits".

"We are in the process of writing some software to decommission an old SCO box that does UUCP transmits of core business software to different locations," he said.

Kempe said Thrifty is acquiring a lot of branches and wanted an integrated way to access its files so Solutions First developed a file system application in Ruby dubbed "Carsfs".