Oticon - Pinguin first

Claus Gårde Henriksen

At the hearing aid company Oticon they use the motto "people first". However the hearing aids from Oticon will actually have met a Linux penguin before they reach the end customer, so Claus prefers the motto 'Oticon - pinguin first'.

Not that Oticon IT-strategy-wise is very different from many other companies today: They have a huge Active Directory Installation that serves more than 3 thousand users. And Windows is the Oticon backbone - no doubt about that.
However, more than 90 Oticon developers primarily uses Linux for development and testing of Integrated Circuits and digital signal processing for the hearing aids. Typically, they have only Windows on their PC and connect via a thinclient VNC or NX session to a Linux server that does all the work. But they can also choose to get maximum value out of their Windows PC by netbooting it as a diskless linux workstation.

Some of the 'building bricks' Oticon have chosen to use are: RedHat Enterprise, Ubuntu, NFS, NIS, VNC/FreeNX, Diskless/NFSROOT, Sun Grid Environment and the SEPP package management system.

Join the session to hear about how they have chosen to setup their opensource environment.

Claus Henriksen (MSc.EE) has a professional background as software developer at Ericsson, NKT Elektronik and Nokia. Currently he works for Oticon as Linux tool- and system- administrator. He is a long-time Linux-pusher and has a hobby of remastering danish Linux CD's for public use. Claus also likes to brack about his mother-in-law, his wife and two kids (and his goldfish?), that have all used Linux for many years with no problems.

This page last updated: Thursday, September 4, 2008