A large industrial bakery in Puerto Rico came to Altamente over three years ago with many of the classic symptoms of larger companies trying to effectively use the Internet to do business. The company's core competency is baking bread and pastries and distributing them throughout the island. What makes this case especially interesting is the necessity to keep the company's focus on bread baking and not IT infrastructure. IT infrastructure can help them, but it can easily become an expensive distraction.

Similar to a lot of companies, they had invested many hundreds of thousands of dollars in workstations, servers, an accounting system, and an IT staff in disparate geographical locations. As a company with a considerable existing investment, they needed a solution that adapted to their infrastructure not one that required significant purchase or replacement.

Altamente installed an Altabox III Enterprise in their central office for email and web access. High speed access (digital dedicated Internet access) was not available at the time, so we used a standard 56 kbps dial-up connection. Because of a unique mail fetching system, they were able to create email users locally and have them be available to the Internet at large. Even though their entire central office was connected by only a single modem, several users were able to share it for light web surfing and email access using their corporate email domain.

The company was pleased with the solution and integration of Altamente's product. They did not require their employees to be retrained in the use of email clients or other add on software products, neither were they forced to purchase any hardware or client software beyond the Altabox III and its integrated programming.

Present

As dedicated high speed digital lines arrive at our client's different locations, they continue to reap the benefits of their initial investment. Broadband now allows them to share their AS/400 among their three satellite offices over a 3DES VPN using IPSEC. Once again, they did not have to buy extra software or retrain to use this feature. IPSEC at the network layer allows all transmission to occur seamlessly, independent of the applications.

Internal access control via the proxy allows the human resources department to manage their 401k and health care plan safely and without distraction.

Email virus scanning has eliminated headaches, downtime, distractions within the company.

In short, our client continues to do what they do best: make bread. This has been our mutual goal, and with Altamente's dedication to solutions built upon Linux and Open Source, it is reality.