The French Ministry of Equipment has approximately 100,000 agents, located throughout France, in several services: central administration, local administration, technical services and navigation services. With 160 remote locations, including 102 local administrations, the Ministry's IT infrastructure is composed of more than 60,000 workstations and 2,000 Microsoft Windows NT servers near end of useful life.

The Ministry of Equipment's central administration for IT (DCSI) is managing the migration's technological drive, in order to guarantee the information system's coherency and the use of state of the art technologies. Under its control, the Linux server migration project began in November 2003. It will continue through the end of 2005, to ensure a progressive deployment at the national scale.

The migration was established in terms of technical and organizational requirements. In order to meet the project's needs, two specific Linux distributions based on Mandrakelinux Corporate Server were developed.

To benefit from technology monitoring, technical assistance and personalized training, the Ministry has also subscribed to the Mandrakesoft Corporate Club.

With Mandrakesoft, the Ministry chose an alternative to proprietary software, and this is a significant step towards technological independence and the guarantee of enduring public standards for its information systems. This large scale project is in concordance with the French government's intent to promote technologies based on public standards, to open public markets to more competition, and also to reduce IT costs.

François Bancilhon, CEO of Mandrakesoft, declared: "We are delighted to see Mandrakesoft's work in terms of server products and services crystallize in such a large project. This is the proof that Mandrakesoft solutions now fit perfectly with enterprise scale requirements. This project is our first achievement among several similar new ones, and is a sign of Mandrakesoft's dynamic growth".