Endacott said the support and upgrades were a "turning point" for her with Linux, and entering into an agreement with Red Hat was no different to a proprietary agreement for its legacy Unix environment.

"We have six servers instead of two so it does involve more support effort [but] the Unix guys transitioned easily to Red Hat with some training," she said. "And we are achieving a 20 percent saving. We were heading for 30 to 40 percent, but 20 is still a good result."

With one-third of all chickens eaten in Australia supplied by Steggles, Bartter's transaction volumes are not -trivial.

"We are a national company which distributes 2.4 million chickens a week," Endacott said. "We have 3500 customers, 4500 inventory items, more than 100,000 sales items per week, and distribute 600,000 cartons, so scalability was a must and cost is always a consideration."

Endacott said most of the challenges so far were around the Oracle applications.