Linux Ahoy!

Roland Stranneborn is responsible for IBM’s Linux business in Asia-Pacific
and leads the ‘Linux Impact Teams’ in all APAC countries. He joined IBM in
1974 and has held several positions, including manager (marketing and
operations) for software and networking as well as manager (systems marketing,
China) for enterprise servers

The Linux strategy...

Linux is an integral part of IBM’s e-business corporate strategy and the
e-business cycle. E-business is about business–not technology–we help
customers understand how it changes the rules for customer relationship
management, e-commerce, supply chain management, and the like. Our Linux
strategy is based on enabling customers to deploy solutions at all stages of the
e-business cycle and use Linux where tangible benefits provide a competitive
advantage to you–our customer.

Because of Linux characteristics like being open, flexible, easy to change
and highly innovative, we believe that it fits tightly into our e-biz apps
framework, which is designed to help customers build and deploy a new generation
of applications. Today, we are delivering market-leading middleware on Linux
that enables customers to integrate existing applications and connect back-end
systems to the Web, as well as a large number of program, products and services
designed to help customers, ISVs and the Linux community take full advantage of
Linux, while building applications.

On service offerings...

IBM offers a full slate of e-biz services for Linux–such as systems
integration, Web-hosting, strategic outsourcing, infrastructure consulting and
planning, open source consulting, installation, configuration, application
enablement and integrated solutions portfolio–to assist customers in
introducing Linux in different stages of the e-biz cycle.

IBM is backing Linux as a clear business decision. We are convinced that
Linux will be a major player in the future, with open standards ruling the roost
and proprietary technologies becoming increasingly irrelevant. The key fact is
that this is a revolutionary technology that is not controlled by any
corporation or emanating from any geography. It is driven by open source
developers across the world and represents a great opportunity for countries
like India, which have significant development strengths.

We see it becoming a leading server operating system and have ensured that we
are best placed to address the related hardware, software and services
opportunities that result from it. Linux allows us to take advantage of major
synergies between our offerings, to design complete solutions. We can offer a
choice of server platforms, middleware, applications and services, based on
customer needs and the IT environment. We believe that this is a capability only
we can provide and it gives us a significant competitive advantage.

On operational advantages...

Many people are using Linux on mainframes to inexpensively consolidate
workloads. Some organizations are also using Linux to consolidate servers and
bring down the admin costs. According to a report by DH Brown, the proliferation
of servers (because of the client-server architecture) has resulted in 15-20%
increase in IT administration and support costs amongst customers. According to
a Gartner report, support for Linux on the mainframe is enabling users to extend
their mainframe environments to new apps as well as Web-enable existing ones.
Linux’s clustering technology offers customers a low-priced, high-performance
computing power.

On the future of Linux...

Most independent analysts believe that Linux will be the fastest-growing
operating system over the next few years. IBM is actively participating with the
open source community for the development and growth of Linux. We believe
strongly in the open source concept and have invested $1 billion to support
Linux. Linux runs across an array of IBM servers. IBM’s software portfolio is
also delivered on the Linux platform. IBM also offers support and services to
customers on the Linux platform. The IBM Linux Development Center in Bangalore–one
among only seven such IBM facilities worldwide– supports business partners and
independent software vendors across the Asean and South Asia regions. The center
brings key IBM enterprise-class strengths to Linux, especially in areas such as
reliability, availability and serviceability, clustering, file journaling
systems etc.

On Linux in India...

It’s really amazing to see how Linux has gained acceptance worldwide and
in India, even though there’s been no active marketing in the last few years.
According to IDC, Linux constitutes 27% worldwide of the server operating system
market share and it continues to grow at 28%. We expect the Linux acceptance to
continue to grow in India as we believe that Linux offers real business value to
customers.

Amit Sarkar in New Delhi