There is no great genius, it is said, without a touch of madness. It remains to be seen if Scott Gibson is a genius. Today, though, more than a few of his colleagues would probably say the vice president of hotel IT for Cendant Corp. has lost his marbles.
That's because Gibson is in the process of deploying one of his company's most mission-critical applications on Linux. At a cost of US$75 million, Cendant, the world's largest hotel franchiser, is installing the open-source operating system to run reservation management software at 4,000 locations.
While most IT managers are considering Linux only for front-end, noncritical applications such as Web servers, a few brave souls such as Gibson are beginning to embrace it as something more: a low-cost, reliable platform for running applications critical to their businesses. IT managers at large companies such as Cendant, Amerada Hess and Deja.com say they expect to save big bucks. But many other managers say they won't follow suit soon, at least until they see how it goes for the pioneers who are willing to take Linux for a mission-critical test drive.
Linux's attractions are obvious: the lack of licensing fees; its ability to run on older, less expensive hardware; and the fact that users get access to the source code. But Linux, a free Unix variant, is still regarded as somewhat of a wild card in some parts of the IT world. Despite recent announcements of Linux support from vendors such as Corel Corp., Oracle Corp., IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co., Informix Corp. and SAP AG, most CIOs say the lack of professional support and desktop office applications limit Linux, for now, to Web and e-mail servers in their shops. And they say it will take more time before they are comfortable enough to think about forcing a change on developers who are familiar with commercial versions of Unix and Windows NT and on end users familiar with Microsoft Corp. Office applications.
For that reason, the emergence of Linux as a platform for running mission-critical applications has been slow, analysts said (see chart).
"We're just starting to see the penetration of Linux into medium and large corporations," said Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst with International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass. "People are able to put up Web servers with Linux at a low cost. But we haven't seen many organizations putting major enterprise applications up on Linux yet."
At the same time, Linux's fan base is certainly growing. Kusnetzky said he expects to see a dramatic increase in the number of commercial Linux distribution purchases over the next five yearsv (see story).
Booking Linux
Two years ago, Cendant began looking for a way to provide all of its franchisees with cost-effective and efficient hotel reservations systems. Gibson selected Front Clerk property management software from Hotel Software Systems Ltd.; those applications happened to run on Linux. While Gibson admits he was unsure about Linux in the beginning, he decided to give it a try after evaluating its low cost and highly regarded stability. He decided that the operating system would be a perfect match for small to midsize hotels running small batch files. As a result, Gibson began booking the open-source operating system into eight hotel chains, including Ramada and Days Inn.
"We didn't see this as an opportunity to break new ground, but as a good business decision," he said. "Now that there's more support, I can see why more people are giving Linux a chance to run mission-critical applications."
Cendant franchisees running the Front Clerk hotel management package are equipped with a server running Caldera Systems Inc.'s OpenLinux Version 1.1. Users access the applications from Windows 95 desktops running a terminal emulation program. The hotel management software runs each hotel's operations and integrates with Cendant's central reservation system, Gibson said.
Analysts say that as more ISVs jump on the Linux bandwagon, fewer IT managers will be scared off by the operating system's lack of traditional support. In fact, Kusnetzky said he sees two distinct groups that will take the lead in running mission-critical applications on Linux: smaller vendors and Internet service providers and academics, researchers and scientists who need high-performance parallel computing.
Linux gusher
High performance for critical research applications was what attracted Amerada Hess to Linux. With oil prices falling, the New York-based oil giant aimed to cut costs by replacing a 32-node IBM SP2 system running AIX with a parallel multiprocessor Linux setup. Amerada Hess said it has struck oil with the decision, using low-cost PCs and Linux to replace the IBM system, which cost the company US$2.5 million to lease for three years.
There's no doubt the application is critical to Amerada Hess. The internally developed system sifts through terabytes of data to render detailed three-dimensional images of the sea floor, which the company's geologists use to decide where Amerada will drill for oil. For this application, company officials were clear in what they wanted: scalability, reliability and savings. Despite Linux's short track record with mission-critical applications, geophysicists last year asked their vice president if they could use Linux. Management agreed.
"Our IT culture is end-user-driven," said Jeffrey Davis, senior systems programmer with Amerada.
Last fall, the company replaced its IBM system with high-end parallel clusters running Linux. A clustering technique called Beowulf uses custom clustering code developed by Amerada Hess. The total cost? US$400,000 for 96 workstations from Dell Computer Corp. and Paralogic Inc.--and US$49.99 for a copy of Red Hat Software Inc.'s Linux 5.2.
But cost wasn't the only reason the company decided to go with Linux; reliability was also key. Each job on the system runs for two to three weeks. And while the company could also have saved a substantial amount by replacing the SP2 with Windows NT clusters, Davis said porting the Unix rendering application to NT would have taken much longer and been more expensive than porting to Linux.
As inspiring as these stories may be, they're not always enough to persuade risk-averse CIOs to take a gamble on Linux. Many would like to see it running more enterprise-class, off-the-shelf financial and database applications before making a decision. And the lack of desktop applications compatible with Microsoft Office is the biggest factor keeping Linux from making inroads on the client side. Even IT managers who are Linux fans say they won't consider Linux as a corporate standard client operating system anytime soon.
"Ninety percent of the world is using Microsoft Office applications," said Bill Cason, senior vice president of IT at New York-based Deja.com, a Web-based newsgroup database and search service that is running all of its Web servers and many of its back-office applications on Linux. "We may consider moving our financial applications onto Oracle in a Linux environment, but it doesn't make sense to move the desktops off of Windows just yet."
Bill Stapelfeldt feels the same way. While interested in testing applications such as Oracle8i on Linux, Stapelfeldt, the systems administrator at Bayshore National Bank, in La Porte, Texas, said the lack of an office suite and other packaged applications is the reason he plans to wait.
"We've kept a close eye on the development of Linux, and we're encouraged by it," he said.
At the same time, Stapelfeldt, who uses NetWare 4.11 to serve 200 Windows 95 and Windows 98 clients in 12 locations, said he'll need a very good reason to migrate. He considers reliability, stability and ease of use issues already covered by NetWare, he said.
But if users such as Davis at Amerada Hess are any indication, the thought that Linux will continue to gain ground as a platform for mission-critical enterprise computing may not be so crazy. In fact, based on the success Amerada has had with its Beowulf clusters, the corporation has given the go-ahead for Davis to evaluate Linux for all back-end applications.
"People are hesitant to use Linux for mission-critical applications," Davis said. "But here, it's the core of our business. Does it get any more mission-critical than this?"
