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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In common with other high-end Unix vendors, IBM is still keen to promote its own operating system, AIX, at the expense of Linux. “For big operations, AIX is still better than Linux,” says Jollans. “In the next few years, Linux will be able to do eight-way processing; AIX can do 32-way at the moment.”
Craig Churchill, Sun’s edge volume and solution manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, also argues that while the company has “always been very positive towards Linux” – an attitude he agrees the market may not always have picked up on – “we’ve always felt able to beat it with Solaris.” Linux’s main appeal is its low purchase price, Churchill argues, rather than any technical superiority. “It rates very highly on total cost of acquisition – the jury’s still out on the cost of ownership scale,” he adds. Despite Solaris’s superiority, however, Sun has felt compelled by some of its customers’ demands to port its software over to Linux and sell low-cost Lintel systems and now regards itself as a key Linux proponent.
Churchill claims that by offering Linux systems, the company has retained customers and even attracted some, supplementing the company’s Solaris sales rather than gutting them – a positive move as far as he’s concerned. However, Russell Coombes, HP’s Linux director, says Sun’s Linux message still is not enough to keep customers from moving to a company that whole-heartedly endorses Linux – such as his own. He claims that 90% of the interest in HP’s Linux servers comes from Solaris users, rather than Windows migrators or those using its own HP-UX Unix operating system.
HP draws a line between the high-end and the low-end, pitching Linux as a good choice for machines with two or four processors, with HP-UX a more advisable choice for more involved work. “We have to be careful,” Coombes explains. “We could really promote Linux and it could be seen as cannibalising our HP-UX installed base or it could be seen as attacking Microsoft. Linux is very strategic to HP now; we are evangelising it, we have many customers and ISVs moving to Linux, so we have to make sure we are part of that whole movement.” And while Coombes mainly sees Sun’s customers leaving Solaris on Sparc for Linux on Intel, he foresees a time when Linux’s ever-improving performance and feature-set affects HP-UX and AIX as well.
The three companies, aware that by removing their hardware lock-in, they are opening themselves up to the possibility of dissatisfied customers being able to migrate to a competitor’s servers with relative ease, are hoping to differentiate themselves through their hardware, services and support. Other vendors are doing likewise.
“What we offer on Intel are enterprise features, such as systems management tools of heterogeneous environments,” says Fujitsu Siemens’ Reger. The reasoning is clear. “There will be a part of the Intel server market – the low-end, price-sensitive portion – where differentiation will not be possible, not asked for and not required by customers,” he says. “In the part where we can’t differentiate, we just do the same things as the others are doing. But for those parts where it really makes a difference, it’s important that we differentiate.”
Xhead: Software vendors
Equally, software developers have been watching Linux’s progress with a mixture of happiness, interest and dismay. For most, Linux is just an operating system. “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 (UK)’s head of technology, says that the company mainly sees it as 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 run on 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. Novell, for a long time the champion of closed, proprietary standards, lost its dominance with its NetWare product of the network operating system market to Microsoft after its rival embraced open networking standards and ease of use in Windows NT. Now it hopes to make a comeback via open standards by allowing customers to run all its network operating system functions on top of Linux. “We’re giving customers independence around the operating system,” says MD Steve Brown. “Customers can run NetWare in a Linux-only environment, or in a mixture, with the robustness, scalability and reliability of NetWare.” New customers will not have to worry about being locked into NetWare, and will have Novell’s support and engineering organisations behind them to ensure enterprise-level reliability. The company is also attempting to create a portfolio of Linux-based applications, a move that has already started with the purchase of Ximian, developer of the Linux-based Evolution alternative to Microsoft Outlook.
Oracle, with no operating system of its own and a long-standing rivalry with Microsoft, sees Linux as a positive matter. “It’s a really great operating system. A really great solution,” says 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, says Coaekaerts, and it does not want to push its customers onto one particular platform, the company has been doing all it can to assure its customers that a move to Linux is not only technically possible but practical as well. “There was still a fear in big customers,” recalls Coaekaerts. “They needed something supported in the long-term. They weren’t sure if Red Hat or the United Linux group were going to be around in the next few years. So we created ‘Unbreakable Linux’, in which we support both Oracle products and the operating system.” Oracle customers using Linux can go directly to Oracle rather than their Linux distributors and Oracle will help them, even to the extent of getting Coaekaerts’ group to rewrite Linux to fix problems. “Now our customers are no longer worried about the other companies.”
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