SUSE Drives Business Education

March 1, 2004


California State University system cut costs while increasing services

Oakland, CA

The College of Business at the California State University in Chico selected SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to maintain its widespread hosting services. Today the school not only hosts SAP and SUSE for their students, they host similar installations for 13 other universities around the world, and they are the front-line tech support center for all 120 SAP charter business schools in North America.

In the fall of 1995, the school replaced a mixture of small, individual application packages with SAP. "As our hosting capabilities grew, our systems aged," said Gino Edinger, manager of Chico's SAP Help Center. "That's when we looked at Linux, and at SUSE." The team at Chico was immediately impressed with SUSE. "The graphical interface in SUSE is wonderful," said Edinger. "Out of the box, SUSE was easy to handle and loaded very well compared to some of the other Linux products."

As with many universities, budgets are tight. SUSE has helped Chico save money while growing their SAP facilities. "SUSE has lowered our overall cost, and we deploy fewer students to help with the servers," said Edinger. "SUSE stability has made us more successful in delivering services to students and to other universities."

"The whole SUSE business experience has been a joy," said Raymond Boykin, Associate Dean of the College of Business. "We were looking for a new option and SUSE delivered. Our partnership with SUSE has been one of the better things we have done in the past few years. We look forward to growing with SUSE."

About Novell
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