Linux is here to stay

From SMEs to large enterprises, government to corporates, SOHO segment to
hi-end workstation market, Linux is making its presence felt in all their IT
infrastructure. The marketshare for Linux servers is expected to grow by 13.6
percent by 2006, while revenue marketshare is expected to grow by 9 percent by
2007.

The Linux market in India is picking up at varied places like SMBs, large
enterprises, government, edu-cational institutions, hi-end workstations, hi-end
desktops and even the home segment. Moreover, just like other parts of the
world, the Indian indu-stry is also welcoming the open source movement with open
arms. Like any other move-ment, Linux has its pros and cons too. The latter is
equally important to create a balance. Vendors supporting Linux strongly believe
in its potential. But, vendors like Microsoft have a different story to tell
about the open source.

Growth Drivers for Linux

There are several aspects that emerged as growth drivers of Linux after
talking to various vendors. Ashit Panjwani, Mar-com, Novell said,
"Reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is among the main drivers
fuell-ing the growth of Linux. It provides the most stable and secure platform
to run mission critical applications, this is well accepted in the industry and
is a major driver for Linux gro-wth." Other growth drivers are availability
of Linux on various hardware platforms and sup-port from major industry players.

Explaining the main forces behind this change in custo-mer's mindshare and
how IBM will tap this potential, Jyothi Satyanathan, Linux Business Manager of
IBM said, "Linux offers better security, producti-vity and most of all,
professi-onal service to customers. This is attracting the customers to shift to
Linux."

According to Nitin Sethi, Workstation Business Manager of HP, the main reason
for Linux's acceptance in the hi-end workstations market, is, "Linux's
availability beyond the traditional unix on high cost hardware is acting as a
key dri-ver for current market status." L Gopalakrishnan, Linux Busi-ness
Manager, Oracle added, "The main advantage that Linux has over other
Operating Systems, is that it comes with open source code based support".

However, having a slightly different overview about this is Abhijit Das,
Manager Platform Strategies, Microsoft, "As per the data available to me,
only 1000 members of the entire open source community can actually do something
with the open source code. That means not every one can amend, make changes or
develop something from the Linux platform".

He added that vendors supp-orting the Linux OS are sup-porting it with closed
source tools.

More Manpower Needed

For the success of any technological tool, it is essen-tial to have
sufficient manpo-wer to handle it. On this front, Microsoft has a fairly good
amount experience. Abhijit said, "Lack of technical manpo-wer to handle
Linux is an issue. And by looking at the comple-xity of this OS, not everyone
can understand this. So the acceptance of Linux OS will be limited among the
young and average minds of the country. Players like, Red Hat and Novell have to
think on this front".

However, Red Hat has started with Red Hat 'Certified Linux Engineer'
program. Novell too has introduced a certification program for generating techni-cal
manpower to handle Linux.

Informing about Novell's initiative to spread education on Linux, Ashit
informed. "Novell has an extensive train-ing program through which we
impart sales and technical knowledge to our channel part-ners. We have already
trained more than 500 channel part-ners on our Linux offerings".

For training on Linux-based applications, Oracle has a multi pronged
approach.

Who Going For IT

Explaining about the segme-nts that are attracted towards Linux, IBM's
Jyothi quoted, "Use of Linux is spreading throug-hout the business world
unpre-cedentedly. In all industries, including telecommunications, petroleum,
geophysical scien-ces, financial services, govern-ment, automotive, computer
aided engineering and design; the economics of Linux are simply
overwhelming".

Talking of Novell's thrust in verticals that are interested in Linux, Ashit
said, "Government is the prime mover in embrac-ing Linux. So that would be
our major thrust area, other seg-ments which look promising include banking and
finance, telecom, manufacturing, BPO".

Moreover, Jyothi also fore-sees that the low cost alterna-tive of Linux is
finding a lot of takers in the SMB segment, and non-metro cities and towns.

Today, most businesses inve-sting in IT are looking very hard at the initial
capital investment, as well as the on-going mainte-nance and license fees that
vendors charge. Once installed, Linux systems require low maintenance, provide a
wide choice of service providers, ren-der restrictive upgrade and maintenance
charges irrelevant and thus save money".

However, this also indicates that Linux-based applications are especially
important in the SMB space where typically there are few IT personnel in-house.
Unlike others, R Mani-kandan, DGM, Sales and Mark-eting of IT products at LG
believes that Linux has poten-tial business verticals like SOHO, home segment.
Elabora-ting on this, he said, "The maxi-mum units have been sold to the
SOHO segment. Infact, we saw a lot of enthusiasm about Linux in the home
segment, as after seeing live demonstration of Linux OS, a lot of customers
showed keen interest."

Giving a view about Linux with respect to the hi-end work-stations market,
Nitin of HP said, "Key technical-work-station verticals are mechanical
design, electronic design, research-scientific computing, digital content
creation, mathe-matical programming, soft-ware development-led by ISV's
abroad. It is felt that all security conscious hi-end customers are now
gradually moving towards open source OS".

Strategies to motivate

Informing about the initia-tives taken by IBM exclusively for the partners
to expand Linux presence in the market, Jyothi said, "We have programs
available for partners who are ready to go to the market.

These include our leaders for Linux program and our NT migration program.
They offer co-marketing dollars for demand generation programs, inclusion in our
events, linkage to our sales teams and special education offers".

However, describing HP's strategy to promote Linux, Nitin informed,
"In technical markets, (workstation (WS): prime markets) customers are very
knowledgeable- they need no convincing and go by usage ease and efficiency of
the OS to suit their applications".

As for LG's strategy for pus-hing Linux, Manikandan said, "We are only
into selling Linux-OS based range of PCs. Creating an awareness in the market is
the prime need and we are alre-ady enacting upon the same." Linux provides
a lot of advan-tages over the alternatives OS's in terms of economy, stability
and above all it is open source.

As a part of Oracle's strategy to push Linux, Gopalakrishnan informed,
"Firstly we adopt Linux OS for ourselves. For example, Oracle's internal
e-mail system is all Linux based. We thus share our experiences with customers
and so they get convinced. As of now, almost 75 percent of total servers of
Oracle are Linux based. We want to convert all our servers on Linux-based
OS".

Overcoming Challenges

Commenting on misconce-ptions as a major challenge that are existing in the
market about Linux, Manikandan said, "While the benefits are tangible,
there are also some misconceptions that enter-prises have with respect to Linux's
readiness for the enterprise. They are lack of support, immaturity of products,
lack of applications, vendor splintering, security and lack of skills. We have
been quite successful in overcoming the misconce-ptions of the customers in the
due course with our well-defined services". However, the list of
challenges for Linux is very big as far as Microsoft's Abhijit's views are
concerned.

Faiz Askari with inputs
from Nelson Johnny in Mumbai and Goldie in Bangalore

WHAT THE CHANNEL DEMANDS

q Strong emphasis
should be made on technical manpower generation

q Interaction between vendor and channel
partner needs to be more emphasized

q The vendor should create more awareness
about Linux

q Aggressive efforts required to dispel
misconceptions about open source