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View Results China's biggest bank makes switch to Linux China's biggest bank plans to deploy Linux on servers across its network of 20,000 national branches in a project that may be the biggest Linux deployment yet seen in China, according to an executive involved with the deal. Under the terms of an agreement announced Thursday, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) plans to gradually roll out Turbolinux's Turbolinux 7 DataServer operating system for all of its front-end banking operations over a three-year period. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. What makes this deal special is its size. With 5.3 trillion renminbi (US$640 billion) in total assets, ICBC is China's biggest bank, serving 100 million individuals and 8.1 million corporate accounts at more than 20,000 branch offices across China. When the project is completed, many of ICBC's 390,000 employees will be accessing applications hosted on Linux servers on a daily basis. ICBC chose Linux in part because its existing front-end applications, which were developed in-house, run on The SCO Group's SCO Unix, and migrating them to Linux was determined to be an easier upgrade path than switching the applications to Microsoft's Windows operating system, according to Claude Zhou, general manager of Turbolinux China. ICBC has been granted a site license and front-end applications based on Turbolinux 7 DataServer will be rolled out on a "step-by-step" basis to all of ICBC's 20,000 offices, Zhou said. ICBC employees will access the applications from terminals. "This is the biggest Linux implementation in China," according to Zhou. ICBC is in the process of choosing a systems integrator to handle the project. Bank executives are expected to announce their decision soon, Zhou said. Officials from ICBC were not available this week to discuss the project. ICBC is not the only one of China's four main banks to have decided to deploy Linux. For example, Bank of China has deployed Linux distributions from Turbolinux and Red Hat in regional projects. More banks are expected to follow ICBC's lead with large-scale Linux deployments, according to Zhou. Agricultural Bank of China, another of the country's top four banks, is expected to announce within the next month a tender for a Linux site license that is similar to the ICBC project, he said. The fourth major bank, China Construction Bank, is also expected to announce sometime this year plans to move its IT systems to Linux, according to China's state-run media. The shift to Linux is driven by the banks' need for better software performance and better vendor support, said Nielse Jiang, an analyst at IDC, in Beijing. Currently, most of these banks are running their applications on SCO Unix and they are looking to upgrade their systems. "In China, SCO Unix offers very weak support for customers; they have so few employees," he said. The banks have also opted for Linux because of lower operating costs and the relative ease of porting their applications from Unix to Linux, Jiang said. They also pay close attention to what the other banks are doing. "If one successful case has been implemented, the other banks will consider doing that," he said.
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The Turbolinux operating system, a variety of GNU/Linux free/open source software, has been chosen as the in-house server software for the front-end banking operations of China's largest bank, replacing SCO Unix.  The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) announced the migration on Thursday, April 28.

The announcement is significant in terms of the sheer size of the bank.  "This is the biggest Linux implementation in China," said General Manager Claude Zhou of Turbolinux China.  The ICBC serves more than 108 million customers and manages their combined assets of US$640 billion (5.3 trillion renminbi).  Its 390,000 employees are scattered across 20,000 branch offices throughout China.  The planned deployment will be undertaken in steps and is estimated to take three years.  

Tux, the serene Linux mascot ''Source: Larry Ewing (lewing@isc.tamu.edu) using The GIMP''

Zhou described the reasons for the planned migration as the stability and security of Linux.  Nielse Jiang, an analyst at IDC, also attributed the switch to insufficient support by the SCO Group.  "In China, SCO Unix offers very weak support for customers; they have so few employees," Jiang said.

ICBC selected Turbolinux over its various competitors, including Microsoft Corporation, in part because of its need to maintain its custom-written Unix-based software.  The increasing scalability and stability of Linux also were factors in the decision.

Turbolinux has been China's number one source of Linux for the past 4 years.  In 2004, Turbolinux held 62.0% of the Chinese server market, and also had 24.9% desktop market share, a much larger portion of desktop share than GNU/Linux holds in the United States.

Turbolinux is an Asian-Pacific distribution of Linux with its corporate headquarters located in Tokyo, Japan, and offices in China and the United States.  Turbolinux claims that its "Turbolinux 7 Server was the first-ever to conform to Internationalization standards to help simplify development of applications that require multiple language support — a critical requirement for software distributed globally," and supports the use of its software in the Japanese and Chinese languages.

Turbolinux was also used as the operating system of choice for China's recent supercomputer, the Dawning 4000A.  With its unveiling on November 15, 2004, China became the third country, after the U.S. and Japan, to surpass the 10 teraflops level of performance in a single machine. The computer, located in Shanghai Supercomputing Center, contains 2,560 64-bit Opteron processors from AMD, each running at 2.2 GHz, and at its introduction was the 10th fastest computer in the world.

Turbolinux is being spread throughout China, both throughout government and the business sector, in key areas such as transportation and telecommunications.  In December 2004, ZTE Corporation, the largest telecommunications manufacturer in China, partnered with Hewlett-Packard and Turbolinux to bring the benefits of GNU/Linux software to that industry.

The other three largest banks in China have either already announced plans for major migrations to GNU/Linux servers running various distributions, or are expected to do so later this year.