The Linux Market Through The
Lens Of LinuxWorld
It
was a very nice conference. If
you entered the show floor and looked to the left and right you’d
be certain you were at a corporate IT show, with large booths from
prominent vendors – IBM, HP, Oracle, Sun, CA, et al – spread out
in an impressive row. While
LinuxWorld continues to have a strong developer presence (T-shirts
are de rigueur for both attendees and booth presenters), it’s very
clear that Linux has gone mainstream.
But
you knew that already. It
was clear when IBM and HP and Sun all offered Linux systems and
Linux support for their software.
It became even clearer when SCO’s law suit, threatening
Linux’s future. became an all-consuming mainstream business issue.
If it only affected a few “geeks in sneaks,” we’d care
– but not nearly so much. In
fact, the reason SCO awoke from its long slumber probably has a lot
to do with the vibrant condition of the Linux market.
So
what did we observe in San Francisco?
Continuing Emphasis On Linux For Enterprise
Servers
All
over the show floor, everyone from distributions (Red Hat, SuSE, and
United Linux) were showing their Advanced or Enterprise wares.
Systems vendors like IBM, HP, and Sun were offering their
most advanced versions of Linux. High-end software vendors (Oracle, CA, et al) were there to
show that they were prepared to support their largest customers with
their most important products.
The biggest customers are customers for Linux.
More
Interest In Linux For The SMB Market
The
SMB market with not at all neglected.
IBM
showed a Linux BladeServer equipped entirely with OpenSource
middleware rather than IBM middleware (which it could also have
used). This was intended to show its commitment to the value pricing
needs of the SMB market. Of
course, IBM is prepared to offer its own branded products on its
Linux hardware products, as customers are ready to expand or move
up.
It’s
not just that Linux is ready for the SMB market. SMB’s seem to be ready to Linux, too. Gartner estimates that about 17% of SMB’s are already using
Linux and another 28% are experimenting with it.
Vendors
such as IBM, HP, and Novell will count on channel partners to take
their SMB products to the marketplace, so look for an increased
emphasis on products that can be sold through resellers, and a
careful courting of business partners such as VARs and SIs.
We expect to see a significant Linux vendor interest in key
vertical markets and in partner skill sets that SMBs prefer to buy
rather than support in-house – think of Web Services, Business
Process Analysis, and wireless networking, for starters, as well as
Linux, Java, and .NET.
Speaking
of .NET bring us to Microsoft.
SMB, after all, is Microsoft’s back yard.
So they, too, were at LinuxWorld, offering advice on how to
migrate from Linux to Microsoft platforms as well as on how to
co-exist in a heterogeneous world that includes both platforms.
Welcome to the real world!
Growing Interest In A Desktop Linux Market
The
real news here was the emphasis Sun placed in the keynote by its EVP
of Software, Jonathan Schwartz, on its upcoming Mad Hatter desktop
play. Mad Hatter will
offer a Linux solution based on Sun’s StarOffice software.
Sun believes this will be a popular choice because it expects
to be able to offer it at much lower prices than conventional PC
plus Office Suite offerings – as much as 80% cheaper in some
cases, according to Sun sources.
The Sun open source desktop will include the GNOME user
interface, Evolution mail and calendaring, Gaim instant messaging
and will interoperate with Microsoft Office and Exchange and Lotus
Notes. Sun also demonstrated a next generation Java 3D desktop technology,
possibly the basis for a future product.
When Microsoft customers were then,
shortly thereafter, annoyed by the Blaster Worm, Sun moved to take
advantage of the event, offering them early registration for the Mad
Hatter technology, due to be shipped at Sun’s Network conference,
September 16-18. We
don’t know how many signed up, but it was probably a good day to
get their attention. Actually,
we’d expect most Mad Hatter users to be non-MS Office users rather
than MS retreads – lots of folks who previously didn’t get an
office suite at all. Think
about bank tellers, retail clerks, factory workers and others who
use email and occasionally need to read spreadsheets but would
probably not need to create long documents or complex models of
their own.
Sun
also used LinuxWorld to preview the next version of StarOffice,
based on the open source code found at OpenOffice.org, a popular
open source community founded by Sun in 2000. Available through many
means, including more than 60 systems OEMs, over 60 million copies
of StarOffice and OpenOffice have been distributed, making it the
leading office productivity suite running on multiple platforms
(Solaris, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X).
(If that number causes you to blink, we did, too.
We expect reality lies in the difference between the words
“distribute” and “use.”)
In Summary
In
short, Linux is rapidly becoming a real market, with something for
nearly everyone, and a growing ecosystem to support major vendors’
offerings. For the
first time, customers were present not just as techies viewing the
toys, but as business professionals, looking to understand business
benefits. And the
customers were there in much greater proportion than at previous
Linux shows, which have been largely developer fiestas.
In
that kind of fast-paced market the SCO Law Suit was viewed for what
most LinuxWorld attendees saw it as – an unfortunate distraction
– rather than as anything likely to change the course of Linux
history.
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