Today, the Wotif.com Web site, which acts as a last minute low rate-finding accommodation service, has over 65,000 user sessions a day and completes over 110,000 bookings for more than 7900 hotels per month. Previously, it was a different story.

Back in 2002, Wotif.com's enterprise architecture based on Microsoft's ASP.NET, was struggling to cope with the company's ballooning growth of nearly 40 percent per year. Locked in with proprietary software that had reached its critical mass and was now threatening to degrade user experience, Wotif.com decided to explore the path of open source.

"When I first came on board at Wotif.com, I stood back and thought we needed a platform that could scale for the next four to five years because the current one would just not cope with our growth," Young said. "The best way to achieve scalability and robustness was with an open source environment so we decided to go down the J2EE path."

"It's made a huge difference to the running of our site," Young said. "One of the main goals of the operation was for every user to have the optimal experience whether they are navigating the site at the same time as 80,000 users or 10,000, and we've achieved that."

Of the slew of open source software the company has deployed, the most pertinent have been the inclusion of the Java-based object-relational mapping tool Hibernate and an authentication module for java called Jpam.