In polite society it is traditionally frowned upon to discuss topics which inspire strongly polarised opinion. This means religion, politics, sex, and Linux, should probably be left out of the conversation if friends and aquaintences want to maintain a civilised veneer.
But lets face it, there's nothing civilised or polite about the business world, and for some very good reasons Linux is the topic de jour.
According to Phil Sargeant, research vice president for servers and storage at IT research group Gartner, most Australia companies have already dipped their toes in open-source waters, and a few are now planning to open the flood gates installing Linux across their server clusters.
"A small percentage are now taking it much more seriously," Sargeant says. "Linux is experiencing a compound growth rate of 13 to 14 percent, and will continue to be the fastest growing server operating system over the next two years."
With tech giants like IBM, HP, and Dell all now supporting Linux-based server offerings in the enterprise, Sargeant believes the open-source operating system has become a much less risky proposition for most companies. As a result, we are likely to see it increasingly installed on mission critical systems over the next 12 to18 months.
"Linux has made its way into some interesting niches like Web services, and big number crunching, but now that the service is there people are starting to look for other places where it might work," Sargeant says.
With interest growing, Anupam Nagar, HP Australia's business manager for open source and Linux, says support is still a fundamental concern for companies considering adopting open-source solutions.
"The question we often face when it comes to Linux and open-source software is; 'who supports it, and will I get the same level of support as I would with a proprietary system?'," Nagar says. "There are those who know what they're doing and come into HP only really for incident-based support, and those who want HP by their side from the word go, to help them to design the system and solve the difficulties they face initially."
As a result, HP is tailoring support levels to the customer's needs and working closely with vendors such as Oracle and Red Hat to ensure interoperability issues are minimal. Nagar believes such levels of cooperation are setting a trend away from software consolidation which has characterised the software market in recent years.
While the software itself may be coming from a series of different providers, the very idea of maintaining and managing support relationships with a range of different companies is enough to cause headaches.
In response, vendors and systems integrators are looking at the creation of software stacks of interoperable environments and applications. This way multiple vendors, does not have to mean multiple support contracts.
Systems integrator Unisys is a case in point. "Our approach is to work closely with vendors such as Novell's SuSE Linux and Red Hat, so that we can put together a stack of interoperable software, and provide a single reference point for services across any part of that stack," says Mike Dooner, programs and alliances director for Unisys Australia. "It's not so much that services aren't available now, they weren't available in the past so there is still a bit of scare mongering going on, and a lot of resistance to change."
thanks very much for this case study