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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Red Hat and SuSE, meanwhile, work with hardware vendors to ensure their distributions are shipped with their servers and have features that the server vendors need. (These features are then fed back into the open source community, where any other vendor can take advantage of them.) SuSE, for example, has taken some of the code for the next version of Linux - version 2.6 - and rewritten it in their current enterprise server, a process called 'back-porting'. Since they are now open source, Red Hat is likely to include them in the next version of its server.
While technical differences may be subtle, distributors have typically used different levels of support to build a following in the enterprise market. But their services businesses are being squeezed by long-established hardware and software manufacturers.
Major vendors are increasingly offering Linux support themselves through their services groups. It is often amounting to little extra effort for the big suppliers - many had already developed in-house expertise to deal with customers with existing Linux installations - and with access to the source code, companies like Oracle can even re-write Linux to make it work the way they want and fix bugs before the distributors.
Application developers
The world's major software developers have been watching Linux's progress with a mixture of interest and dismay.
Some are keen to play down the significance of Linux. “CA has always had a credo of supporting whatever hardware our customers use,” says Marcel Den Hartog. “Linux is just another platform.”
Martin Tenk, SAP's head of technology in the UK, takes a similar line, saying that Linux is just another platform to support to give its customers choice, while technology consultant Steve Curtis of PeopleSoft, which has decided to port of all of its applications to Linux, says that the company is merely reacting to customer demand. “PeopleSoft has always said that it is being driven by the market, not leading the market. We look at where the market is going and we've seen a big shift in the last 12 months in the potential for use of Linux, with a lot more institutions actively looking at it.”
Others, however, see Linux as an opportunity and are rushing to embrace it. After years of relative decline, Novell, a long-time champion of proprietary standards, is launching a comeback via open standards. “We're giving customers independence around the operating system,” says Novell's UK managing director, Steve Brown. “Customers can run NetWare [Novell's network operating system] on Linux, with the robustness, scalability and reliability they expect.” New customers will not have to worry about being locked into NetWare, he says, and will have Novell's support and engineering organisations behind them to ensure enterprise-level reliability.
Oracle too sees Linux as wholly positive. “It's a really great operating system. A really great solution,” gushes Wim Coaekaerts, principal member of Oracle's Linux kernel group. “We have full deployments around Linux and it saves us a lot of money.”
While Oracle does not promote one operating system over another, the company has been doing all it can to assure customers that a move to Linux is practical as well as technically possible. “There was still a fear in big customers. They needed something supported in the long-term. So we created 'Unbreakable Linux', in which we support both Oracle products and the operating system.” Customers can go to Oracle instead of their Linux distributors and Oracle will support them, even to the extent of getting Coaekaerts' group to write Linux bug fixes. “Now our customers are no longer worried,” he says.
The next phase of Oracle's plan is to ensure other companies' applications are available on Linux. It is investing millions of dollars to encourage independent software vendors to port their software to Linux. It is also making much of the fact that its own business runs on Linux; at the recent LinuxWorld trade fair in San Francisco, Chuck Rowzat, an Oracle executive VP, said the company had successfully moved most of its IT infrastructure to Linux, one year after CEO Larry Ellison issued an order to do so.
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