Supply side
- Article 1 of 1
- Enterprise Linux, September 2003
Customer demand is forcing the IT industry to embrace Linux, whether it likes it or not.
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The majority of IT vendors used to be very wary of Linux. Server vendors were worried about the effect on their own operating system businesses, while software suppliers feared that a raft of free products would undermine sales of commercial offerings.
Now, as customer demand for Linux grows, most suppliers are rushing to embrace it. Sometimes, the open source operating system has been found to fit perfectly with a supplier's strategy; more often, the decision to embrace it has been a painful, but ultimately rewarding one. Even many erstwhile opponents have managed to come terms with it.
Systems vendors
Computer suppliers fall into two camps: those that ship machines that have another company's operating system and those that produce their own operating systems.
For the likes of Dell and Fujitsu Siemens, which fall into the former camp, a Windows machine is no different from a Linux machine - bar the licensing cost, which is passed on to the customer. However, such suppliers are finding that Linux helps them make savings in other areas.
Fujitsu Siemens, for example, is sometimes described as a Sun 'clone'. It sells Sun Sparc-based Unix machines running the Solaris operating system, but it also sells Windows on Intel (Wintel), Linux on Intel (Lintel) and even Linux on mainframes. The benefit of Linux, says Fujitsu Siemens, is that it cuts its development costs. “It started as a technology affair, but it quickly became a business affair,” says the company's chief technology officer, Joseph Reger. “We relaunched our Linux efforts a couple of months ago. It's been paying off and growing like crazy.” Now 30% to 40% of its Intel server business is Linux-based.
For IBM, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Sun Microsystems, each of which has its own, highly lucrative version of Unix, Linux was clearly more of a threat. Yet both IBM and HP have championed Linux, investing billions of dollars in advancing its features for enterprise customers.
Even Sun, which seemingly had the most to lose, is introducing Linux-based machines into its product range. But its dilemma is typified by the way it continues to sell Solaris/RISC [reduced instruction set computing] based systems at the low end.
Analysts say it is unclear how profitable those low-end Solaris machines are to Sun. “Sun has always competed with Intel designs, and to some extent it is still thinking along those lines,” says Andy Butler, a Gartner vice president. “Our expectation is that it will become more and more difficult for Sun to get real profits from designing, building and shipping small RISC/Unix servers.”
Linux has been better news for IBM, which for many years sought a solution to one of its biggest problems: how to maintain confidence and loyalty in its various server platforms, including mainframes and AS/400s. “Linux has helped it achieve this goal,” says Butler, by giving it a single, widely used operating system that can run on all its hardware, reducing development costs for both IBM and its customers, and giving customers a wider choice of applications.
“What Linux gives you is a cross-platform operating system,” says Adam Jollans, IBM's worldwide Linux software strategy manager. “You can decide to run it on one server today and then, in the future, if you decide you need to run it on a mainframe, you can make that choice.”
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