LIC Joins The Linux Bandwagon

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Kolkata: : It is Linux time for the financial sector. Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), the largest insurance company of the country, is implementing Linux, the open source code operating system, replacing SCO Unix across its 2,048 branches.

For IT officials of LIC, Linux will ensure ease of use, scalability and application freedom and considerable savings in its insurance business.

Said Mr H Nanda, deputy secretary, software development centre, IT department, LIC, “We chose Linux over some popular proprietary OS like Windows as we wanted to run all our existing in-house applications without spending much and at the same time did not want to be tied to license based OS. We will have the necessary freedom in future to develop various applications according to customers’ requirements.”

LIC officials believe that by choosing Linux the company will save a huge amount of money in terms of licence fees, minimum use of third party applications and customisation cost of existing applications.

Said Sanjay Prasad, manager - enterprise sales, Red Hat India, “LIC is using Red Hat 7.X version of Linux which has come bundled with the Intel servers of IBM, HP, Wipro and Accel ICIM. LIC has bought around 2,048 Intel servers bundled with Red Hat Enterprise package.”

For Red Hat, LIC has become one of the biggest customers in the financial segment. Red Hat will provide centralised support and training along with helping LIC’s software developers develop Linux based business applications.

Said Mr Prasad, “The financial sector is getting attracted to Linux. After banks like IDBI, Central Bank of India and Kotak Bank, LIC too has joined the Linux bandwagon.”

LIC has an in-house IT team of 2500 employees. In the past, the company has developed its own IT applications to computerise its database for claim settlement, new businesses, policy servicing, 1.25 employees’ records and maintenance of accounts. Except in a few branches where there have been some migration problems on account of hardware and software issues, the applications are already running on Linux OS.

At present, LIC is using Linux mainly as a back-end operating system. The company has MS-Exchange for emails, etc on some desktops at the branch level.

But LIC plans to have most of its front-end functions on Linux soon.