Powering enterprises: Linux catching up

By A. A. Harichandan

BANGALORE, NOV. 18. The gaining popularity of online computing, networked PCs and the Internet, viewed as the way of the future means operating systems which run the servers that power both web sites and e-commerce transactions, enabling large scale database applications and file and printing tasks, will be very much in demand.

Last year, an IDC report on sever operating systems forecast overall shipments of sever OSes to grow at a CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) of 17 per cent till 2004. Linux, a strong contender, was forecast to grow at a CAGR of 28 per cent from 1.3 million units in 1999, the year Linux beat Novell's Netware to become the number two server OS, behind Windows NT, to 4.7 million units in 2004. The study, however, said Linux would still come in second to Windows family OSes in 2004.

Linux Multi-client study: In April this year, IDC released the findings of its `IDC Linux multi-client study', collating responses from 845 European and North American corporate respondents. The result has mixed signals for Red Hat Inc., a popular Linux vendor, which commissioned the study.

The findings say 25 per cent of the respondents were ``actively evaluating Linux, second to Windows 2000, no other non-Microsoft operating system was even close". Nearly 40 per cent of the respondents were deploying Linux for new applications or actively evaluating it.

However, Windows 2000 was still the number one choice for almost 96 per cent of the respondents and almost 40 per cent would select it exclusively. In fact 70 per cent of the respondents were deploying Windows 2000 for new applications or actively evaluating it. There was potential for use of Win 2000 in 90 per cent of the cases.

Windows 2000 had gained rapid market familiarity (server OSes that decision makers were most familiar with), and criterion like `ease of use' or installation and other `ease ofs' have become less important.

On the other hand ``reliability has jumped up dramatically as a top-of-the mind decision criterion for system software in the past 18 months and 25 per cent of the respondents stated this as an important driver for Linux deployment.

Experienced users of Linux among the respondents see Linux as more mainstream, easier to use and better supported. They do not see a serious long term cost advantage in the use Linux. Reduced dependency on one OS vendor was an important factor.

Barring the experienced users, Linux was not viewed as mainstream. Non-availability of applications was still an issue, even though it was less important compared to 1999. According to the study, Linux's share of fully-loaded IT budget doubles to 6 per cent in 2000-01 from 1999 and is expected to increase to 8.5 per cent in 2002.

Red Hat's India focus: Mr. Javed Tapia, CEO of less than a year old Red Hat (India), told The Hindu recently that Red Hat's global strategy of earning revenues as a services and projects company in the server and networking areas would be followed in India too.

World-wide, as enterprises looked at fresh investments, Linux was increasingly being considered, ``especially in the face of changes in licensing policies of other players (read Microsoft)," he said. The same was true of India, he said.

Adding credibility to the fact that Linux may become an enterprise's legitimate choice is that the Linux OS has been ported from the 32 bit Intel architecture to many others like Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC and SPARC. Big names like Oracle, SAP, HP and IBM have already ported their development tools and software to Linux.

Some of the features that the multi-platform OS offers are real time programming, high availability - no problems with long duty cycles - and scalability. This feature, also known as extreme Linux systems, would be particularly useful to biotech firms with high throughput needs, as it allows them to build machines of supercomputing capabilities at a fraction of the price of a supercomputer.

Govts. are interested too: In August this year, Red Hat India went on road-shows covering six cities, Mr. Tapia said.

The awareness level was fairly high, especially among the bureaucrats ``which created a strong pull," he said. Red Hat had made presentations to the governments of Gujarat, Maharashtra and the Ministry of Information Technology. Even the government of Goa was ``interested" he said.

Red Hat India plans to expand its presence from Mumbai to Delhi and Bangalore. The company has also tied up with nine OEMs as technology partners, in areas including embedded systems and wireless.

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