The E-Business Software Weekly is a series profiling trends and developments in software and applications that support e-business, the Internet, and other electronic communication channels. Look for a new story each week in this space.
Linux in the Enterprise
The revolution began with a whisper.
Like most people of his day, when Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, Finland, purchased his first personal computer in 1991, he found it pre-loaded with MS-DOS, Microsoft's market-dominant operating system. Like many people, Torvalds was less than satisfied with the operating system's occasional quirkiness and inefficiencies--particularly since he was accustomed to using the university's more powerful and more stable UNIX OS.
But unlike most people, Torvalds refused to accept the operational concessions that MS-DOS required. So he decided to write his own operating system--a compact form of UNIX economical enough that it could run on PCs. A few months into the project, on October 5, 1991, he posted this seemingly innocuous message on a computer bulletin board dedicated to Minix (a form of UNIX):
"Do you pine for the nice days of Minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and dying to cut your teeth on an OS you can try to modify for your needs?ä As I mentioned a month ago, I'm working on a free version of a Minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the stage where it's even usable (though may not be depending on what you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution. It is just version 0.02ä"
Entering the Corporate Arena
Torvalds hadn't set out to be a revolutionary; he just wanted a better, more stable operating system. But he soon found that many other developers shared his aspirations. As the Linux legions grew, battalions of developers became an entire army--to the point that now, merely a decade later, more than 10 million programmers, software engineers, and system administrators are using Linux.
Another army of programmers has been watching these developments with more than passing interest. Their general, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, declared at a January 2001 investment conference that "Linux is our enemy No. 1." James Allchin, who oversaw the rollout of Microsoft's Windows 2000 OS, went even further. Linux, he declared, represented a "threat to the American way."
Judging by Corporate America's rapid embrace of Linux, Ballmer and Allchin certainly have reason to be worried. Consider:
• In IDC's January 2000 Linux usage survey, 32% of respondents said that Linux was being used for system and network management functions within their organizations.
• In the same survey, 42% of respondents indicated that Linux was supporting application development.
• Some 57% reported that Linux was being used to run "a major application."
• And nearly 90% said that Linux was supporting their basic network infrastructure services, including Web services.
All told, according to IDC, Linux shipments for server operating environments grew at a 24.4% clip in 2000, faster than any other operating system. In fact, by the end of 2000, according to NetCraft, a consultancy that monitors server operating systems, Linux claimed fully 30% of the Web server market, a market share equal to Microsoft's.
Microsoft was feeling the impact. As BusinessWeek reported in its February 22, 2001, edition, by the beginning of 2001, only 26% of large corporate IT departments had switched to Windows 2000, a far slower uptake than with previous versions of Windows. The magazine noted: "If it's taking existing [Windows] NT users that long to adopt the new operating system, then something must be stalling them."
That something, of course, is Linux.
Enterprise-class performance
Corporate IT departments do not choose operating systems based on idle preference or philosophy, particularly when it comes to powering enterprise-critical applications and services. That is one reason why it is significant that IDC, a leading computer industry research firm, could report in a 2001 white paper that "Linux is clearly moving from the early stages of adoption to becoming an established part of the IT infrastructureä This software is well on its way to being considered a mainstream [enterprise] operating environment in many sectors."
One key explanation for this success is that Linux does offer many significant benefits over competing operating systems. The most obvious, of course, is cost. In announcing its intention last year to employ Linux for its U.S. dealer sales network, for instance, a major auto manufacturer predicted that it would realize up to $650,000 in immediate savings by adopting Linux, and as much as $1 million per year thereafter. More generally, an analysis by Linuxcare, using then-current software and hardware list prices, revealed a Linux price advantage of between 8-to-1 and 15-to-1 over other leading server operating systems in a file and print server comparison.
But cost savings would be meaningless without comparable performance. And while Linux has long been known for its stability--often operating for a year or more without crashing--it has faced limitations in other key areas, such as I/O throughput and scalability. But even those barriers are starting to recede.
As long ago as February 1999, PC Week Labs determined that Linux's operational performance was "in line with Windows NT 4.0 on comparable hardware," concluding that Linux now had "the horsepower to perform at the enterprise level." Subsequent benchmark tests revealed that Linux's operational performance bested Windows NT's by up to 50% in Web serving and by up to 250% in file serving.
More recently, with the release of Linux's new operating kernel, version 2.4, Linux has established itself as a "far more robust versionä equal in many ways to other UNIX operating systems," according to a BusinessWeek review. Perhaps most importantly, the report goes on, "Linux 2.4 is tailor-made for the next generation Intel chip, called the IA-64 or Itanium," expected to debut by early 2002, bringing with it vast improvements in power, performance, and memory utilization.
Predicts VA Linux CEO Larry Augustin: "When [Itanium-powered] computers start rolling off production lines, Linux will be on equal footing with everyone else, including Microsoft, in terms of taking advantage of the new hardware."
Dot-net or dot-not?
Microsoft, although late to the Internet party, managed to dethrone the previously invincible Netscape Navigator as the leading Web browser through a carefully orchestrated strategy of alliances and pricing incentives (in particular, by giving away its Internet Explorer browser for free). Ironically, Microsoft may be at risk of suffering a similar fate, at least in the corporate server market, at the hands of the freely available Linux.
Already, Linux has won the support of many of the top computer hardware manufacturers, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, NEC, Dell, Compaq, and Sun, who are either spending large sums developing Linux-related applications or otherwise bundling Linux with their systems. Indeed, IBM has committed $1 billion to Linux development and another $300 million to Linux training.
But what is perhaps more significant over the long term is the underlying shift in the corporate computing infrastructure itself. Microsoft, through its .Net initiative, has acknowledged the accelerating movement away from packaged and client-server computing applications toward Web-based services--an impending transformation long predicted by many of Microsoft's competitors. And Microsoft has launched a serious and substantial effort to turn that trend to its advantage.
But as the veritable offspring of the Internet, Linux is in an enviable position. With software built from the start (rather than having to be re-engineered) for Web-based operations, with a global, if virtual, developer community that exceeds Microsoft's, Linux is in a sprint whose pace Microsoft and the makers of traditional UNIX OS packages simply may not be able to match.
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