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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This ability of application and hardware vendors to provide operating system support poses problems for Linux distributors. Two years ago, as Linux was starting to look a serious possibility for enterprise, fear of a repetition of the great Unix fragmentation of the 80s drove many potential customers away from Linux and encouraged many would-be resellers such as IBM and Oracle to look for a de facto standard distribution. “We went to all the Linux distributors and asked which of them was serious about the enterprise,” says Coaekaerts. “Red Hat was the first to come forward.”
But after Linux distributors clubbed together to develop the Linux standards base, a way of ensuring that distributions and software remain compatible through constraints on what may be altered in a Linux distribution, the fear subsided. The result now, according to SuSE Linux's strategic alliance director Malcolm Yates, is that no one in the enterprise really worries about which Linux distribution they use. “Fragmentation concerns disappeared about two years ago. People don’t ask that question any more.”
But if no one worries about which distribution they use, how can distributors make their products more interesting to enterprises than other distributors’? Fundamentally, Linux distributors have few ways to differentiate themselves technically in the mainstream enterprise market, with some smaller distributors choosing to specialise as a way of making themselves more attractive; Red Flag is more popular in the Far East because of its enhanced text-handling capabilities for eastern languages, for instance, and Connectiva fares equally well in South America thanks to its support for Brazilian Portuguese. The larger vendors, Red Hat and SuSE being the existing main enterprise favourites, work with hardware vendors to ensure their distributions are shipped with their servers and have features that the server vendors need. These are, of course, then fed back into the open source where any other vendor can take advantage of them. SuSE for instance has taken some of the code from the Linux 2.6 kernel, including the new asynchronous i/o and granular resource control, and rewritten it for its Enterprise Server based on the 2.4 kernel. Since these changes are now open source, Red Hat is now likely to include them in the next version of its server.
If other vendors provide support to their enterprise customers, support is no longer a way to penetrate the market at the top-end; instead, distributors use partnerships with hardware vendors to establish footholds in large enterprises. But support is how they intend to penetrate the small to medium-sized market. The small and medium-sized business with only a few servers or perhaps just one is not often interested in support from the likes of IBM Global Services – they want costs as low as possible, and they are perfectly happy to go with the distribution that keeps their costs down while offering the most benefits. Red Hat and SuSE are both duelling for enterprise interest with ever better support deals; SuSE now offers to provide unsupported patches to customers the second they fix a bug, with support coming once the patches have been thoroughly checked; Red Hat includes five years of support with its enterprise servers.
Equally important to distributors are the vendors who are platform-neutral who may not have the resources, the inclination or the customer-interest to justify a Linux support department.
“You’ve got to bear in mind that PeopleSoft is fairly early on,” admits PeopleSoft’s Curtis. “We have had Linux support on three out of four layers of our architecture for quite some and through our new partnership with IBM, we can now support the application server – the fourth layer. But we’ve not got a customer in the UK running PeopleSoft on Linux all the way through.”
Similarly, SAP’s Tenk confesses that although 1,000 of the 60,000 SAP installations worldwide run on Linux – enough to warrant full support globally - only one of those is in the UK and Ireland. SAP and SuSE have now agreed a deal whereby SAP customers running their software on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server will now received centralised support from engineers specifically trained in the software combination.
One reason for this platform agnosticism is many enterprise applications are written to run on virtual machines or J2EE application servers – wherever the virtual machine or application server can run, their application can run. So as long as there is a Linux virtual machine or J2EE application server, their application will run on Linux with minimal effort. While SAP has its own virtual machine, Linux’s similarity to Unix making it an easy port, and Linux has a the free J2EE application server JBoss, IBM and other vendors have ported their own application servers and virtual machines to run on Linux.
“In our experience, people will play with open source programs (such as JBoss) but deploy on enterprise class ones,” claims BEA’s Griswold. “The main roadblock to mass adoption of Java in the enterprise was the lack of a good Java virtual machine for the Intel architecture. Intel knew it was going to make a big move into the enterprise. So 18 months ago, we signed a deal to bring jRocket to Linux. We now have the highest performing Java virtual machine in the world.” Linux is also now the fastest growing platform for BEA’s products as a result. “It’s remarkable, the degree of change in the Linux market over the last 12 months or so. There’s been a dramatic increase in interest as well as full-scale enterprise deployments of Linux. It’s almost like in the last 12 months or so most of customers are now viewing Linux as ready for prime-time.”
Having a Java virtual machine and J2EE application server suitable for the enterprise means that companies that would not have been able to move their products to Linux are finally able to do so. Customer relationship management software specialist Siebel, which remained closed-mouthed about Linux until the start of the year, announced a deal with IBM to integrate its software with IBM’s WebSphere J2EE platform. The company’s vice president and general manager of alliances, Jeff Scheel, acknowledges that IBM’s decision to bring WebSphere to Linux is key to the company’s own Linux strategy. “It insulates us to the issue of individual operating systems, so we can run wherever the applications runs, including Linux,” he claims. “This is the only way we could go to the Linux. With IBM’s help, we could get there sooner than with our own app server.” Scheel also hints that if customer demand is enough, it will also move its application server to Linux. “When it becomes a critical component of customer demand, absolutely we will have it.”
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