Linux in the Enterprise Closer Than You Think
What the Enterprise Needs
Brian Proffitt
Thursday, December 12, 2002 01:50:18 PM
There have been quite a few articles on the topic of what the
enterprise needs to properly implement Linux of late. Quite a bit of
it is fall-out from that aforementioned forum. The press, I will
freely admit, love such affairs because they are usually great places
to get a lot of stories in a short amount of time. That, and the free
food.
I have watched with some bemusement the overall trend of the articles
that are coming out on Linux in the enterprise, and not just the ones
from ELF. What Linux needs, these articles intone, is more
applications to be successful. If only there were more applications
for Linux, pundits and corporate IT people have said, then it could
not help but be more successful.
Let's be clear here: they're not talking about just any old
application. Given the sheer number of apps and utilities that have
been built for the UNIX/Linux space, such requests seem rather
absurd. No, what these people want are neatly wrapped pre-packaged
applications that will install easily and run without a hitch on their
systems with little to no configuration time involved.
The range of these applications is great--from huge databases to
little utilities that will tell you what the temperature is
outside. Office suites are certainly in there, though there is more
concern for what's going on with the servers than with the
client. Grid computing is in there as well, ramping up to true
supercomputer-speed computing efforts that have already caught the eye
of the financial services industry.
Linux can handle all of these things now, of course, but for IT
managers that have put all their eggs into the Microsoft basket, the
transition to these applications is perceived to be too hard.
This could be argued against. But this is
another argument for another time. If there is indeed a real need for
applications, however, then there is evidence to suggest that
independent software vendors are responding to the call.
Already we have seen companies like Oracle, IBM, Veritas, Steeleye, and SAP
jumping into developing applications for the Linux space. According to
a study from IDC, the biggest growth in Linux right now is in the
area of custom application development. Linux is still big in Web
services, according to Jean Bozman, VP of server research at IDC, as
well as in security and collaborative workloads. But custom
applications development is growing fast.
Are applications going to be the panacea for Linux in the enterprise?
Perhaps. When I spoke to Bozman earlier this week, I asked her to
highlight the differences between Linux server adoption now and Windows server
adoption in the mid- to late-1990s. She related that even though
Windows NT was out in 1993, it wasnot until NT 4.0 came out in Augsust
of 1996 that things really took off for NT in the server space. The
difference, Bozman explained was that NT passed its main competitor
Novell not in terms of a network operating system but as an
application server.
In other words, she said, it surpassed Novell's application base and therefore
became more attractive to IT shops.
There is no denying that applications are a key to success to Linux in
the enterprise. But it is not the only key. There are other things the
Linux community could do to accelerate the adoption rate.
Next: What Else the Enterprise Needs »
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