Is Unilever coming from mainframes and Unix on the server?
Well, we have no more mainframes at all. We have Unix for our large-scale applications. We have Windows as well. We’re a typical heterogeneous environment: we have something of everything somewhere in our business. One is always faced with that challenge in that heterogeneous world: how do you provide real security in its broadest sense – availability, reliability, integrity, access, authentication, navigation? All of those things are hugely challenging. Historically, the answer was always to standardise everything and make it homogeneous, and then you can manage it. Clearly, that’s not realistic in today’s world. Is that because of things like, for instance, mergers and acquisitions? Absolutely. And we have joint ventures, so one has that complexity to manage. That becomes an ongoing challenge; it’s not going away any time soon. What applications are being taken across to open source? At the moment the migration of applications [is] purely infrastructure, firewalls [and so on]. It’s b
