Still, the point of sale is the central element in any restaurant operation and Garden Fresh had struggled to find a system running on Linux that met all its needs. "The last five years were spent going and talking to the different vendors that had wonderful software and all kinds of options. The Linux options were slender," Thomson recalls. "From a practical standpoint, until the last year, you could not run point of sale under Linux. There was no component to the restaurant industry that was available to someone that was interested in that. Still, there was always a hope that what we were trying to do with Linux was not as far out as it seemed to be."

Garden Fresh's interest in Linux is not exactly typical for the hospitality industry. "There was a general surprise that we were seriously interested in Linux," Thomson explains. "When we began our serious point of sale investigations a year ago, it was amazing how little interest in Linux there was in the industry. Most people flat out said, 'We don't do it.' In fact, at a certain point in our investigations, I was pretty much resigned to running under a Windows platform."

An exploding movement

Even as other industries have moved to adopt more and more Linux-based applications, the hospitality industry is proceeding much more slowly. Since its inception Linux—an operating system that began as a open source variant of the powerful and stable Unix platform—has gained scores of disciples that adore its open source ethos and the fact that it has a lower cost structure. Still the fever has yet to fully envelope the hospitality industry in the same manner it has other industries.

Still, Linux continues to grow both inside and outside of the hospitality industry. According to Peter Kastner, executive VP of the Aberdeen Group research firm, Linux continues to make steady progress, growing from 6 to 9 percent of the retail point-of-sale market (including restaurants and lodging). Because the license fees for Linux software tends to be much lower than other operating systems and can be run on less expensive computing platforms, more and more IT departments are turning to Linux as a low-cost alterative.

Still the rise of Linux has not been without significant challenges. While Microsoft has challenged the notion that Linux is indeed cheaper, the most serious challenge has come from SCO Group, a company that holds a patent for Unix code and argues that Linux is really a version of Unix. SCO is arguing in court that all users of Linux must pay a license fee to SCO. When the recent MyDoom virus began a denial of service attack on the SCO website, it was seen as a response by some on the lunatic fringe of the open source movement on SCO's efforts to stop the Linux freight train.

Despite the efforts, it is becoming increasingly clear that Linux is here to stay. Most major Linux providers, now have indemnified their users from the results of the SCO litigation. A growing number of hardware devices are operating on Linux and it is slowly capturing a desktop niche that may soon rival Apple, if not Microsoft. Still, it is mostly in enterprise settings that Linux is hitting its stride as the platform of choice for a growing number of companies.

For Garden Fresh, a restaurant company with 150 owned and franchised Souplantations and Sweet Tomatoes soup and salad restaurants, the primary reason for moving to Linux was price and a desire to keep its IT department small.

"We're a low cost operator," Thomson admits, "Our fundamental interest was to automate everything. From the point in time that we put in electronic registers and electronic time clocks, it was so the cashiers and managers wouldn't have to enter information more than once. So we really like things that are batch oriented, behind the scenes. Our managers at the store level are not data processing people. With Linux, we really see the ability to continue that automation in a way that is still manageable with a very tight and reliable staff."

From a very early point Garden Fresh recognized that Linux could help them streamline store automation while at the same time reducing IT costs. "Linux is about as close as you can get to DOS and Unix without the cost," Thomson insists. "With Unix there's always been the ability with shell scripting and with the chron manager to automate functions: time of day, time of week, and to handle a complex series of steps very easily without the necessity of the operator selecting, pushing buttons, or following complex steps."

Making Linux work

Garden Fresh started looking at Linux in '97 and '98. "At that time, we were just getting our foot in the door. We started in late 1998 with a simple Linux server tied to our Novell system. That was our first experience with Linux, then it grew slowly from there."

Garden Fresh initially began the transition from Unix to Linux with its accounting and back-office systems. "Our main accounting systems have always run under various flavors of Unix," says Thomson. "One of the problems with Unix and AIX, HP Unix and all that, is cost is very prohibitive. It's known for its robustness and its manageability, but it's very costly. Our early experience with Windows was it required a lot more management."

For Garden Fresh an interest in Linux should not be confused with an obsession. Linux made sense for its price and the drive to simplify IT management. At the corporate head-quarters, Windows desktops prevail. "We did have early discussions on switching to Linux at the desktop," Thomson notes, "but we realized we weren't going to be able to accomplish that, so we settled on just the back-end systems with Linux."

The final piece of the puzzle

All that changed at the 2003 Multi-Unit Restaurant technology conference. "What we found was really exciting," Thomson recalls. "There was at least one company that had a system that was operating system independent—they could sell it to you for Windows or Linux; it made no difference to them. In addition, there were two other companies that we talked to. So last year the options expanded dramatically—as a salad bar concept we always like options, just like our customers."

Garden Fresh is currently piloting two different POS systems, from Volante Systems as well as Progressive Software. "It's been there for just about 90 days, and we're at the point where we're deciding where their ROI is going to be and can we afford to move this out to the rest of the company," Thomson reports. "From a functional standpoint, it works beautifully. Now we're faced with the situation that we've always been a low cost operator. We've had a very efficient and economic system based on electronic registers and PCs. What advantage does true point of sale bring to the table? And, there are some significant ones. Can we leverage that sufficiently to make it pay off?"

"Halfway through our investigation, we latched onto Volante and really took a closer look at it, but operating system was only one of the factors," Thomson insists. "Functionality was the most critical. At the end of the day, while I happen to have a strong preference for Linux, it wasn't realistic for that to be a driver of the decision. It wouldn't be fair to the company to make a decision like that based on something that's a philosophical choice."