An open agenda
- Article 12 of 16
- LinuxUser & Developer, April 2006
Unisys thinks it's the ideal company to sell open source to the enterprise. Rob Buckley talks to its head of enterprise Linux to find out why
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Unisys is one of the oldest technology companies in the world – dating from an age when keyboards had no connections. Founded in 1873, the company began life as E. Remington & Sons and sold the first commercial typewriter. Over the years, it has evolved to become an IT company, manufacturing servers, providing consultancy services and offering outsourcing facilities among other things.
Like much of the industry, it uses Intel chips in its servers but has concentrated almost exclusively on high-end enterprise work. Yet unlike those other giants of enterprise technology, IBM and HP, Unisys is new to the open source party. For much of the 90s, its preferred operating system was Unix – in particular SCO UnixWare – but this century, it added Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition to its line-up and at the end of 2004, Linux.
We caught up with Hans Sparkes, the company’s EMEA head of enterprise Linux, to find out why Unisys has finally embraced open source and why it now thinks it’s the best choice of server vendor for the world’s largest companies.
LU&D: Why did Unisys make the move to Linux?
HS: Our strategy from 2000 was to move from closed systems to more open system on Intel. At the time, Microsoft’s Datacenter was the only product up for the job, but engineering were also looking at other areas. Internally, we were developing on Linux in 2003, adding 32-way support into the 2.4 kernel. All of the work we did we then contributed back to the community to give Linux that enterprise robustness.
But it wasn’t made known to the wider Unisys or our customers: engineers being engineers, they do lots of good stuff and they only tell you at the end when it’s just ready to be released. But, someone higher up recognised that in the market there was this trend called Linux, and saw what was happening. The two things happened to coincide, so we said, “Let’s do it”.
Linux has been around for some time and the first big rush happened in the late 90s. Why did you only latch on to it in 2004?
Prior to 2004, although there was activity there, it would have taken a brave person to say that Linux was enterprise ready. It really wasn’t. But the end of 2004 was the watershed: Linux moved through the tipping point. People like SAP and Oracle started delivering their Linux strategy and because major ISVs came in and said, “Look, we do this as well,” it was then recognised as a safe option to deploy Linux.
Are you only interested in Linux or are you also working with other open source products?
We’ve put together a full open source software stack for customers. We can go to organisations with open source choices at each level, from the platform through the high-availability side through networking through database through middleware up to the application end.
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