[MiddlewareSpectra] Linux Comes of Age
Adam Rifkin
Adam@KnowNow.com
Sun, 8 Jul 2001 18:34:41 -0700
According to IDC numbers recently quoted in the Wall Street Journal (April
9, 2001), Linux has moved up from 16% of the server market in 1998 and 24%
in 1999 to 27% in 2000. For comparison purposes, Microsoft W2000 has a 41%
market share, up from 38% in 1999. This means AT MOST right now, Solaris
has less than 33% share. And if you think about AIX, HPUX, and others,
Solaris server market share is probably significantly lower than 33%.
The biggest reason why Linux is likely to be adopted by enterprises in
ever-increasing numbers in the next decade? IBM. "So who, then, is buying
Linux in the big company market? No one is surprised to hear that IBM
mainframe customers have discovered that running Linux on a mainframe can be
a very convenient solution, providing a familiar and robust environment.
But IBM reports that there are customers putting Linux on mainframes that
never had an IBM mainframe at all or never used it in this part of their
company. Such customers are likely to be using these big Linux servers for
virtualization, to be able to run thousands of simultaneous Linux session on
a single big server. The ability to run both Linux (new) applications and
native OS (old) applications at the same time is also viewed as a big win."
http://www.wohl.com/middleware5-01.htm
Linux Comes of Age?
Appearing in MiddlewareSpectra Report*
by Amy Wohl, May 2001
In the last year, the Linux story has changed from the adventures of
an interesting band of eccentric nerds to an operating system that
draws the increasing interest of corporate IT. Linux is actually
becoming respectable!
According to IDC numbers recently quoted in the Wall Street Journal
(April 9, 2001), Linux has moved up from 16% of the server market in
1998 and 24% in 1999 to 27% in 2000. (For comparison purposes,
Microsoft W2000 has a 41% market share, up from 38% in 1999.)
Such respectability necessarily brings change, some of it long
desired by Linux aficionados (and probably needed), some of it feared
by Linux purists.
All of this has taken place in a declining stock market, where newly
created Linux companies have been treated unkindly, loosing
significant market valuation and, with that, their ability to use
their market capitalization to easily expand through acquisition.
Instead, they must take the harder and longer route of finding
partners and building customer relationships and revenues, all in a
limited resource environment.
Changes to Linux market
While individual technical users - and webmasters buying cheap,
reliable servers - continue to be strong buyers of Linux, the up tick
in corporate activity is clearly visible. On the Buyer side, a
variety of businesses are noticing the cost savings, stability, and
reliability of Linux, as well as its enhanced features, the
interesting aspects of the Open Source development model, and the
availability of increasing amounts of business software.
Smaller businesses typically buy Linux through systems vendors such
as VA Linux or VAR's who specialize in particular vertical markets,
with expertise in the Linux platform. We'd expect to see more of
that now that the Caldera/SCO deal has closed and SCO is getting out
of its traditional Unix/Small Business market, leaving this playing
field to Caldera. Also, many Intel server vendors, including IBM,
Hewlett-Packard, and Compaq, but also including Dell and Gateway, now
offer Linux support on their hardware, extending the Linux market to
both their direct customers and through their VAR partner channels.
Corporate Activity - customers, corporate vendors (HW, SW)
Fortunately, the entrance of many large, stable companies, especially
traditional systems and software vendors including IBM and HP have
permitted corporate confidence in the future of Linux to continue its
rapid growth.
It does mean that much of this growth has benefited large, well-known
companies rather than the smaller, newer, more Linux specific
companies.
Corporations are now routinely considering Linux for all sorts of
server applications. We find this story can best be told by looking
at what appears to be the broadest current strategy, that of IBM.
IBM and the Linux Market
In fact, IBM has become a major factor in the Linux market. For IBM,
Linux solves (or moves towards solutions) in several areas:
· It supports cross-platform application development. IBM
customers are very likely to have a heterogeneous environment,
including departmental servers (NT and UNIX), lingering OS/2 servers,
AS/400's, and mainframes. Linux operating systems can run across all
of these environments, IBM offers Linux-supported middleware for all
of them, and applications that run on Linux, run on Linux (with the
usual caveats for systems eccentricities and limitations).
· It's a competitive solution that it's unlikely Microsoft or
Sun will try to meet. That gives IBM competitive advantage on both
its hardware platforms (versus Sun in the UNIX market) and in the
middleware market (versus both Microsoft and Sun's iPlanet group).
IBM believes that Linux crossed the threshold and moved into
corporate applications in 2000 for a variety of good reasons.
· The corporates were finished with their Y2K repairs.
· Saving money is now a more important issue. Linux is
cheaper to acquire, essentially free, and generally viewed as cheaper
to administer and support than other (read Windows) operating
systems, based on its greater robustness.
· While Linux isn't ready yet for every Enterprise application
(SAP, for example), it is ready for a number of mission critical
tasks. IBM delineates four areas where it sees corporate customers
buying into Linux:
(1) High Volume Infrastructure
Many corporations go to Linux as a way of providing a low cost, very
reliable, highly scalable environment. IBM says 50% of their Linux
sales are in this environment. Here you will see such traditional
Linux server applications as web servers, firewalls, caching servers,
print and file servers, and messaging servers. This is often the
Linux entry and proof point for many corporate customers.
(2) Distributed Enterprise Applications
An important area where Linux's very low price is clearly a
consideration is this one, especially in retail distribution (so far
stores have been prime customers) and financial services. Insurance
agencies are also an important part of this market segment.
Nearly everyone has read about the splashy Linux win in Japan, where
Lawson Stores will be installing 15,000 Linux point of sale servers
with remote management and support. IBM's Global Services will
supply the implementation for this large project.
Banks are also looking at Linux for branch office systems, often
replacing older OS/2-based systems. IBM reports that there are
pilots underway in both the U.S. and Europe. This might be a good
time to mention that Linux is an international, not a U.S.,
phenomenon. Germany is one of the most aggressive countries in
embracing Linux, helped by the SuSE Linux distribution, based in
Germany and the fact that IBM's work to bring Linux to its mainframes
was done at its Boeblingen laboratories.
(3) Workload Consolidation
A surprising turn of events for some analysts has been the strong
interest of IBM customers (and some new customers) in using IBM's
z-series (IBM's newest mainframes) and soon their i-series (AS/400)
servers as Linux servers for the purpose of consolidating what would
otherwise be running on large numbers of smaller servers.
IBM permits a z-series customer to run Linux in a partition while
continuing to run the normal mainframe operating system (and its
software and data sets). Special pricing for Linux middleware is
available not just from IBM, but also from Computer Associates,
Compuware, and others, which can make this a very appealing idea,
saving considerable money.
Currently, there are over 100 pilots running Linux in this workload
consolidation mode, including application in financial services,
service providers, and telcos.
(4) Rack-Mounted Intel Server Clusters
Linux started on Intel and when hundreds of these systems are
clustered together (IBM can currently cluster up to 1,024), it is
possible to reach super computer power at relatively low cost.
Universities and scientific and technological applications such as
life sciences were initial customers. Financial services for risk
management and portfolio optimization appears to be another good
target market. Clusters targeted to specific vertical industries
will be arriving later this year.
IBM has a Linux strategy for each of its hardware platforms. For the
P-series (its AIX-based Unix servers), it's a multi-part strategy.
Today, IBM offers software that permit Linux applications to be
recompiled to run in the AIX environment. Later this year, IBM will
support Linux running in partitions on the P-series platform.
Changes to Linux
Linux itself changes on a regular basis. Linux developers can, of
course, make any modifications they choose to the Open Source code.
Changes are regularly offered, refined, and considered for the next
update of the Linux kernel, still nurtured by its inventor, Linus
Torvalds.
In January, 2001 Linux Release 2.4 was published; work on that
release began in May, 1998, and this release was considered to be too
long in coming.. In March, Linux developers gathered at the Kernel
Developers' Summit to discuss possible changes for the next version.
A beta version (Release 2.5) is scheduled to emerge later this year
and the release itself (Release 2.6), hoped for by year's end, but is
likely to emerge sometime in 2002.
The goal is to do much better, from a scheduling point of view, this
time. It's hard to meet schedules, however, when the programmers
writing the code are volunteers, located anywhere, doing the work
partly because they enjoy it and partly for the glory. Scheduling of
new releases will clearer be an important pressure point with larger
numbers of corporate clients in the picture.
In line with the corporate interest in Linux, the emphasis in the 2.6
release is on scalability, larger memory, and support for enterprise
class databases as well as enhanced Internet protocols, security (a
big Linux/corporate issue), and laptop support. A Webcast of
presentations given at the event is available at
http://www.osdn.com/conferences/kernel/.
What's a Server
One of the reasons it's hard to track the Linux market is that market
research firms count servers and servers are not necessarily a good
measure of either revenue or processing power. For example (numbers
are from IDC for the 4th quarter of 1999, similar figures for 2000
should be published momentarily),
*
Compaq sold 18,000 Linux servers in the 4th quarter of 1999, giving
Compaq 25 percent of the 72,400-unit market.
*
IBM was second, with 7,000 servers and 10 percent of the market.
*
Hewlett-Packard was third, with 5,400, Dell fourth with 5,200 and
Fujitsu Siemens fifth with 2,300.
But this fails to take into account the fact that IBM may include
mainframe servers in its numbers (and surely will in the 2000
numbers). Such servers may take the place of hundreds of individual
Intel or UNIX servers and, of course, sell for much higher prices.
Counting up server noses is one way of looking at a complex market,
but it may not tell you very much about what's really going on if
many of the large Buyers are moving to larger scale Linux solutions.
IBM is not, of course, alone in this market. Many vendors of Intel
servers to the Linux market offer high-end cluster configurations.
For example, Linux specialty house VA Linux has recently announced
new servers for its high-end cluster configurations, optimized for
dense implementations in applications like web server farms and at
telcos.
To further muddy the waters, most IBM Linux servers, regardless of
size, are sold with substantial quantities of IBM middleware - web
servers, systems management, messaging and collaboration, data bases,
etc., etc. Most other server vendor's partners with software
vendors. They take a share in the profits of middleware offerings
shipped with their servers, but only a share.
Server versus Desk Top Activity
Linux has been mainly a server operating system. Of course, there
are Linux aficionados who have the enthusiasm and skills to use Linux
on the desktop, but so far they have been only a small part of the
overall Linux market. On the desktop, where the user is directly in
contact with the operating system and its user interface, Linux was
perceived as too demanding for most mere mortals. In addition, very
few popular desktop applications have been ported to the Linux
environment, so as long as the focus of users is running software on
their own desktop computers, this has been a significant barrier.
Times may be changing.
*
A number of vendors have created special, easy-to-use (make that
nearly invisible) installers for both Linux itself and for Linux
applications, designed to make it easy to take an existing
Intel/Windows environment and make it Linux friendly.
*
Friendly (Windows-like) user interface/file and systems management
schemes are arriving to facilitate users painlessly into the Linux
environment. Eazel's Nautilus, for example, works as a shell in the
GNU environment and a number of Linux and UNIX vendors are
distributing it with their products.
*
Corel was a pioneer in this area and its WordPerfect Office and
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite Linux Editions, together with Sun's
StarOffice are possibly the best-known Linux desktop applications.
Desktop application development focuses on several lines of attack:
existing vendors port applications; new vendors create applications
for the Linux market particularly or add Linux to their list of
supported or to be supported platforms as they plan their marketing
strategy. Internal IT programmers and Systems Integrators and VAR's
are also adding to the body of desktop Linux applications which will
eventually find their way to market.
Key to this thinking is a distribution strategy. While Linux itself
is an Open Source play and is distributed for free as a download (or
for a small fee for providing an integrated distribution and its
documentation), applications are generally not free. They may,
however, in the spirit of the Linux market, be priced differently
than those for other platforms. Sun, for example, distributes the
StarOffice Suite for free.
Much of the Linux desktop software market operates on the web as
downloads, efficient and economical. But corporate buyers may want
something more controlled and better supported, so as the corporate
market grows, on both desktops and servers, we'd expect to see higher
priced and better (perhaps more formally is a more politically
correct word here) supported options to appear.
There is also a growing interest in a Linux component market (just as
there is already an interest in a web-based Java and XML component
market). Some of this occurs via Linux sites, but also through
intellectual property marketplaces and programmer marketplaces like
HotDispatch. This is still in its infancy, but we'd expect corporate
users to find it especially useful for outsourcing small jobs for
which they lack specific skills.
Standards activities
Linux is all about Standards and the political correctness of the
Open Source lifestyle. Corporations like the upside here - the
promise of things working together on an ongoing basis and the
existence of a vast community of smart people who will help you out -
but may find the downside (from their point of view) hard to take.
This is a world in which corporate users must settle for less
control. For example:
· It's fairly typical in the usual vendor/customer
relationship for big customers to have lots of clout. That means
that big customers can get features added to operating systems,
middleware, and applications, sometimes to the detriment of the
product design or the overall cost of future support. This can be
especially true early in a market or when several of your big
customers come from a single market segment and have similar special
needs.
In the Linux world, unpaid developers and their spiritual leader,
Linus Torvalds, make decisions, based on technical issues and their
sense of priority (which often has more to do with what important
members of the group wants to work on next than with the demands of a
commercial market.
We expect that as large companies enter the Linux market, as both
customers and vendors, this will inevitably change. Customers
understand the uses of influence and large vendors expect to need to
keep their largest customers happy.
· Small vendors lack both resources and cash flow. Therefore,
it's easy to change the course of history by coming in and offering
them business (revenue and cash flow) in return for spinning the
course of product development in a favored direction. Do that a few
times and a company may end up with a completely different focus - or
none at all, but it might end up with customers and profits. It's
very seductive.
Open source developers don't belong to anyone (in a general way)
other than themselves. They can choose to continue working on
interfaces or performance or whatever they find interesting and
important - even if that's not what customers are interested in. In
that case, customers will wonder off, but they weren't looking for
customers anyway, but rather converts to their religion.
Large vendors have plenty of resources (although not infinite ones)
and can choose to use some to satisfy early customers (they often
seek out particular kinds of customers to enter into partnership
agreements) and still maintain a reasonable pace toward their
intended goal. Their problem is more often that they aren't as
flexible as they should be in responding to changes in the market so
they fail to apply their resources in the best possible way - making
room for at least a few small, new companies to succeed in each round.
A real issue for Linux, as big vendors and big customers enter the
market is whether the graceful ways of Open Source development can
survive the deep pockets of pressured development schedules vying for
a scarce people resource. If they manage to pull enough skilled
Linux programmers out of the Open Source pool, we may need a new
development model. Big companies might not mind the return of
control, but they certainly wouldn't like the change in the pricing
model.
Who is Linux for?
So who, then, is buying Linux in the big company market? No one is
surprised to hear that IBM mainframe customers have discovered that
running Linux on a mainframe can be a very convenient solution,
providing a familiar and robust environment. But IBM reports that
there are customers putting Linux on mainframes that never had an IBM
mainframe at all or never used it in this part of their company.
Such customers are likely to be using these big Linux servers for
virtualization, to be able to run thousands of simultaneous Linux
session on a single big server. The ability to run both Linux (new)
applications and native OS (old) applications at the same time is
also viewed as a big win.
Some examples are helpful.
· Canadian ASP coreFusion uses Netfinity servers and Linux to
provide a robust environment for providing Domino web hosting. The
ability to offer multiple virtual servers on a single servers allows
coreFusion to also offer its services to smaller customers who would
not otherwise be able to take advantage of the software. coreFusion
expects to offer selected applications from the Lotus business
partner community.
· ERP Central is a portal for ERP consultants. They offer ERP
news, job postings, and other information, but their big "traffic
builder" is a free time and expense tracking program which users can
access to maintain their schedule information and submit it back to
their offices from the site. Linux hosted and built on top of
Websphere and dB2, the application can scale to handle over 100,000
users and organizations whose consultants use the software estimate
that it saves them 75% in time savings, an average value of $500,000
per organization per year.
· At the Wimbledon Tennis Championships, Linux, dB2, and
Netfinity servers make it possible to offer real-time information on
scores to fans around the globe. Last year, over 914 million web
hits occurred during the games, requesting scores and statistics.
IBM has been working on real-time score presentation systems for a
dozen years, for both Wimbledon and the Grand Slam matches,
incorporating new technological advances over time.
To continue to attract customers to the Linux platform, however, IBM
and other vendors will have to attract application vendors (as
compared to middleware or software infrastructure vendors) to the
platform. IBM plans to do this with a new test site, which allows a
software developer or an internal IT department to test an
application for the Linux mainframe environment. Tests for
appropriateness are offered and those who pass these tests can apply
to IBM for assistance in porting their applications.
Who are the Winners and Losers?
If Linux succeeds in the corporate environment, it will do so by
pushing to the side opportunities for Microsoft's Windows 2000 and XP
environment and Sun's Solaris. Both of them maintain that Linux will
never have the proper qualities or support for a corporate class- or
service provider- class operating system, but IBM's support for Linux
and its success with corporate customers in the Linux market may make
this harder to maintain.
Linux is undergoing a period of expansion. Both its traditional Open
Source supporters and a variety of new partners in both new and
traditional companies are now extending its features and building new
Linux applications. This activity has greatly enhanced Linux'
already considerable market potential and it is possible that in
Linux we are looking at the operating system that Unix might have
been if only we had been able to select and support a single version
of Unix.
But vendors and customers are both fickle, always looking for the
Next Big Thing. It will take another year or two to tell whether
Linux has staying power and continues to build significant vendor and
user commitments, or whether it was simply one more chapter in the
convoluted history of UNIX itself. It looks as though Linux has
already gone past that point, but we await customer and application
activity to tell the final story.
Drawing A:
Linux Architectures vs. Linux Marketectures
Drawing B:
IBM Sees Linux in Four Markets
High Volume Infrastructure
· Web servers Caching servers
· Print/File Messaging
· Firewalls
Distributed Enterprise Applications, focusing on
· Retail Distribution
· Financial Services
Workload Consolidation on
z- or i-series Servers
Cluster Solutions (Multiple Intel Servers)
Super Computer Power for
· Universities/Scientific/Technical/Telcos
· Financial Services
References
IBM Linux Home Page
http://www-4.ibm.com/software/is/mp/linux/
Eazel and its Nautilus Interface: http://www.eazel.com
Corel Linux http://linux.corel.com/
VA Linux and its Cluster Servers http://www.valinux.com
*MiddlewareSpectra Report is an independent resource on business
integration and network computing through middleware and message
brokering.
----
Adam@KnowNow.Com
In a biology class, the professor was discussing the high glucose levels
found in semen. A young female (FRESHMAN) raised her hand and asked, "If I
understand, you're saying there is a lot of glucose, as in sugar, in male
semen?" "That's correct", responded the professor, going on to add
statistical info. Raising her hand again, the girl asked, "Then why doesn't
it taste sweet?"
After a stunned silence, the whole class burst out laughing, the poor girl's
face turned bright red, and as she realized exactly what she had
inadvertently said (or rather implied), she picked up her books without a
word and walked out of class. . . and never returned. However, as she was
going out the door, the Professor's reply was classic. . . Totally
straight-faced he answered her question, "It doesn't taste sweet because the
taste-buds for sweetness are on the tip of your tongue and not the back of
your throat."
-- http://www.fys.ku.dk/~nick/Jokes/jokes.pdf
When Apollo Mission Astronaut Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon in
1969, he not only
gave his famous "One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Mankind"
statement. the other
astronauts and Mission Control. But, before he re-entered the lander, he
made the enigmatic
remark, "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky."
Many people at NASA thought it was a casual remark concerning some rival
Soviet Cosmo-naut;
however, upon checking, there was no Gorsky in either the Russian nor
American space
programs. Over the years, many people have questioned him as to what the
"Good luck, Mr.
Gorsky"statement meant, but always met with no comment. On July 5, in Tampa
Bay, FL, while
answering questions following a speech, a reporter brought up the 26 year
old question to Arm-strong.
He finally responded. It seems that Mr. Gorsky had died and so Armstrong
felt he could
answer the question... When he was a kid, Neil was playing baseball with his
brother in the backyard. His brother hit a ball which landed in front of his
neighbors' bedroom window. The neighbors were Mr. and Mrs. Gorsky. As he
leaned down to pick up the ball, he heard Mrs. Gorsky shouting at Mr.
Gorsky, "Oral sex ?! Oral sex you want?! You'll get oral sex when the kid
next door walks on the moon!"
-- http://www.fys.ku.dk/~nick/Jokes/jokes.pdf