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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Because it’s such a new area, it has a lot of hype around how good it is and how everyone should be doing it. The customers say, “Yes, but what should I be doing?” We’re trying to driving a line through that, trying to derive the best route for each and every organisation, because they’re all at different rates of adoption: some may have started, some may not. It’s useful to have someone impartial, because we don’t have a proprietary system to propose as a primary offer. We can say it does depend and we’ll help you work on the decision process. That’s refreshing to some people. They would trust us because of our enterprise background. We care about the final solution.
Has the move to open source attracted any new customers?
We have had some success in terms of attracting new business. We find that almost every organisation has got Unix somewhere and they want to know if they should now be looking at Linux.
The other area it helps with is application development. There’s a whole area here that organisations haven’t necessarily got their heads around which is how to integrate some of the open source libraries and components into their own development suites. There’s a whole new boundary yet to be explored.
So we'll be looking at every one of our customers and saying, “Where should you be on this journey? What’s the right approach for you to take? Does it make sense and how does it help you take that first step?”
Organisations need to evaluate what they should be doing. They can’t avoid it. They may have strong views for or against but they can’t avoid the decision. Some people actually use the decision as a chance to stop and rethink what they should be doing for the next few years. They can forget history and ask what they should be doing.
What can we expect to see from Unisys in the next couple of years in terms of open source development and promotion?
There’s going to be more management in there, more virtualisation, more on the dynamic partitioning. Linux will almost be on a parity with Unix in most people’s eyes. In two years, there’ll be almost nothing between them and then it’ll be much easier to decide what to do in the future: it’ll be Linux, no debate. At the moment, there’s still some hesitancy from organisations that have their core applications deployed on Unix. Unless they’re coming to a major change, do they want to make that step? We can demonstrate it’s worth doing it, but once we get parity in terms of functionality, it’ll be a much easier decision.
Why should a company come to you for their open source needs, rather than IBM or HP, say?
The objective bit. With the best will in the world, if you’ve got competing offerings, you’re not going to be so objective as an organisation that you’ll say, “We do this on open source,” and that’s it. We have an edge there.
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