Playing the game
- Article 1 of 16
- LinuxUser & Developer, September 2003
Linux has had a huge impact on businesses and their software suppliers in the last two years.
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For a free operating system, Linux has made surprising in-roads into the enterprise. It now powers 32% of all new servers sold, according to analyst group IDC, and the last year has also seen a rapid increase in enterprise adoption of Linux for mission critical systems. Many enterprise software suppliers are porting or have already ported their software to Linux. Why is it proving so popular to so many supposedly conservative groups?
Linux’s boom among enterprise customers is predominantly down to one main reason: cost. “Every now and then, you see something appear at the right time,” says Marcel Den Hartog, systems vendor Computer Associates’s chief executive in the European, Middle-East and Africa region of its Linux Technology Group. “Linux came at a time when everyone was looking at their investments, their IT costs. It’s a lot cheaper and so very attractive and that’s given Linux an enormous boost.”
But Bob Griswold, VP and general manager for enterprise application vendor BEA’s Java runtime products group, says that improvements in Linux itself have also contributed to the increased interest in the enterprise. “Linux represents freedom from being bound to a certain vendor. And it has changed a lot, with the introduction of the 2.4 kernel and its scalability benefits. The widespread view among our customers and at BEA is that Linux is serious and ready for primetime.”
Griswold says that BEA became aware through communication with its customers two or three years ago of an increase in Linux’s popularity as a results of these factors and the performance provided by the combination of Linux and Intel hardware. So it chose to embrace the Linux explosion.
Confronted with this surging popularity, other suppliers have done likewise or have chosen to oppose it. Even former opponents have had to come terms with and even ship products based on Linux while trying to protect their core products.
X-head: Systems vendors
Systems vendors have traditionally fallen into two camps: those that ship machines with their own operating systems, and those that produce hardware with another company’s OS on it. For the likes of Dell, which falls into the latter camp, a Windows machine is no different from a Linux machine bar the licensing cost associated with Windows. Fujitsu Siemens, which sells Windows on Intel, Linux on Intel, Solaris on Sparc and Linux on mainframes, started working with Linux initially as “a technology affair, but it quickly became a business affair”, says the company’s CTO Joseph Reger. “We re-launched our Linux efforts a couple of months ago. It’s been paying off and growing like crazy.” Now 30-40% of its Intel server business is Linux-based. “We wish to do a lot more with Linux,” concludes Reger.
But for IBM, Sun and HP, each of which has its own Unix-based operating system, Linux is a potential threat. However, IBM has championed Linux and invested billions of dollars in advancing its features for enterprise customers, while Sun has begrudgingly introduced Linux-based machines into its product line.
IBM, with machines ranging Intel-based xSeries servers running Windows 2000 through Power4-based iSeries and pSeries servers running AIX and zSeries mainframes running zOS, is keen to have a single, widely-used operating system that can run on all its machines, reducing its development costs and letting customers have access to a wider range of applications.
“What Linux gives you is a cross-platform operating system,” says Adam Jollans, IBM’s worldwide Linux software strategy manager. Linux is the ‘one-size fits all’ panacea IBM needs to heal the rift between its disparate systems while simultaneously curing customers’ fears of being locked in to one vendor by their hardware choice. “You can decide to run on one server today and then in the future decide you need to run on a mainframe. You keep that choice.”
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