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Kentucky Fried Chicken
KFC runs mission-critical applications on Linux
While everyone is involved with the millennium bug and the revelries to welcome the 21st century - KFC, the fast-food restaurant which known as "the chicken expert", embraced the open source mantra during the last quarter of 1999.
Even before major IT services firms spent millions of dollars on big and flashy advertising campaign announcing they are supporting Linux, KFC decided to build their core IT infrastructure within the open source framework and chose two (2) Fujitsu Primergy servers to run it.
When asked why risk, as it seemed to be back then, migrating to open source, Gamaliel G. Lagman, Senior System Administrator of Menu System, Inc. (MenuSys, the spin-off MIS group of KFC) said, "Stability, cost effectiveness and flexibility."
Lagman narrated operational stories that often end up in a blue screen. "We are running a total of over a hundred KFC stores nationwide, that create, on the average, 30 million transactions monthly. These transactions need to be consolidated and aggregated everyday. With this workload, the system back then often leads to a blue screen. Stability was the biggest issue of our system." Lagman recalled.
Faced with the daily blue-screen grind, the MIS group started to look at alternatives and found a theoretically viable one with going open source or Linux.
"We started our leap to open source by migrating our ECR system to a POS set-up by doing a ground-up development. We wrote the initial codes in Visual Basic for the POS unit then Perl-CGI for the Backoffice System." Lagman shared. "With the application finished, we tested it on top of our Linux box running Red Hat 6.2. Intentionally, the rollout was cautiously slow. Everything looks good on paper but rolling it out is a totally different animal. Back then, we do not know any major IT services firm that fully support Linux hence implementing it enterprise-wide had big up-front risks involved in it. And if something really bad happens, there is no one to call and to talk to. We have to do everything on our own, rely on ourselves and make sure we document everything that transpired. We needed it to form part of our very own knowledge-base." Lagman detailed.
But once the implementation was replicated successfully, MenuSys' pioneering effort paid-off handsomely. "For one, we can roll out the application with very minimal cost. We do not need to pay any new licensing fees for the server's operating system unlike what the market is used to. That's big for a business like ours. Just imagine over a hundred stores and on each store has at least 3 client users. From our calculations, we already have saved millions, and counting, since embracing open source." Lagman emphasized.
Lagman also added the advantage of having the freedom to reconfigure the operating system to perfectly suit their needs. "It is something that we cannot do in proprietary operating system," Lagman quipped. He also shared their experience on 'open-source-easily-hacked' that was aptly managed when they explained that securing the system is a matter of reconfiguring it. He also emphasized on the fact that they do not have to pay anything extra if they decided to have the system available on the web.
"But the greatest challenge we faced was having confident Linux-based users. Once we got that, it was smooth sailing from then on. The Fujitsu Primergy was a big help. It added to the stability and reliability factor of the whole system. The Fujitsu Primergy consolidates and aggregates the daily POS data. It is the backbone of our system and it has not let us down." Lagman said.
When asked if he will recommend open-source, Lagman said, "Definitely!" and when pressed for future plans on the platform he shared, "Linux-based routers."
The two Fujitsu Primergy servers acts as the "consolidators" for daily uploading of data of all the stores. The servers consolidate the stores' daily sales reports to the head office, including stock movements and inventories. Time keeping and price setting can also be performed, as well as online ordering and projections via dial-up to the company's Intranet.
