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Telstra Considers 45,000-Seat Linux Deployment
stressky writes: "Looks like major Aussie telco Telstra are looking at deploying Linux as the new Standard Operating Environment across their 45,000 desktop LAN workstations." An anonymous reader offers evidence that Telstra isn't alone; apparently, many other Australian businesses are considering a similar switch.
And once people start having to use Linux at work, and see that it's a perfectly usable system and a nice desktop, they might start switching over at home.
People are lazy, they know windows, they're not likely to change to something they don't know unless they're forced. But if they've already had some exposure to Linux, they'll be much more willing to try it out at home.
Telstra simply evaluate the alternatives. That's normal business procedure. OK, it's nice they consider Linux instead of just ignoring it, but that doesn't (yet) mean that they'll actually select it.
You can be sure that MS will throw in their full marketing weight on such a business...
Oh well, we can hope...
From the article from Australian IT:
OK, sounds reasonable. However, when asked about this, M$ came up with (also from the Australian IT article):
This doesn't seem to tally. Perhaps he meant the middle finger on each hand?
Telstra have been MS junkies a long way back, Bill G made a point of wowing the Australian Government with presentations to Cabinet in the early days of the commercial net (1996/7 - early for MS) and with that push went the Govt owned corporates, of which Telstra is one.
Telstra nearly lost their commercial ISP business due to faillings in Win NT's stability in those days.
They also got extremely upset with MS publishing criticism of their Broadband strategy earlier this year (they'd thought they were buddies)
At a guess though I'd say Telstra are using this bit of smoke to help their negotiations with MS, negotiations on a number of fronts.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Rather, each organisation that deployed Linux was doing so for specific, discrete reasons, Mr Beck [Microsoft Marketing Manager] said.
so does it follow that there was no reason for using Windows? or...
in other news, following MS marketings logic, RMS declares there is no trend towards people using Windows, they were using it for specific reasons.
On one level Linux is really just an operating system, and will not neccesarily promote world peace. But on the other, Linux has won the "hearts and minds" of people with an anti-corporate image. If large evil companies like Telstra (which I hear is even worse than Qwest, if such a thing could be imagined) start endorsing it, Linux may be seen as just another corporate tool.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
is like knowing where you've been.
/usr/share/doc/myapp) ....
The problem with the current Linux desktop is that it's almost very hard to 'know',
You never know exactly what cut and paste is.(crtl+insert, drag over , crtl+c{things are sure to break!} anything else).
Or how the printer options are going to come up. {KDE print dialoge, configure lpr dialoge}
What a right click will do.
Where the help is (man, info{ahhh the great info},kde help or
Things are far better than a few years ago..
Some things that might help would be:-
Put some UI, design (aesthetic and technical) principals into the LSB
and have a LSB certification for applications.
Resolve the GTK,QT issues (should hopefully happen over the next year or two)
Ask other people if they could kindly implement there GFX toolkits/widgets using QT or GTK.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I don't think a lot of people use SUN desktops at their workplace; the heavy lifting behind the scenes is done on UNIX maybe, but most office-type work is still done on Windows machines. If the office worker gets used to Linux for word processing, spreadsheets etc. then it will definitely make using Linux at home less of a mystery. Remember, most people still haven't actually seen a Linux desktop.
Sounds like a bargaining chip deal to me, and yes, I am quite cynical. The company did recently choose a Sun Java solution over MS and IBM offerings recently though, so maybe they are trying to move away from MS. If they do go with linux, you can safely bet on the solution being provided by Sun as they appear to greatly admire Mr. McNealy.
Without starting a war, I think that in order for linux to be deployed successfully in a corporate envrironment, someone is going to have to build a highly functional, standardized desktop environment. Gnome and KDE are the obvious choices, but what kills linux (for the newcomer) is the overabundance of choice! Abiword, Kword, OpenOffice, StarOffice, Applix (if they are still around). Pick one! Now do that for the multitudes of packages that provide duplicate functionality. This is the only way that someone is going to get Linux in the front of the day to day workers in any corp. Choice is great for geeks, but not for the standard fare business environment. Someone will ship a distro with one shell, one office package, one browser, one mail client, and they will be the company that puts linux over in the workplace.
When linux is loading it says
...
Giving linux a good kick in the arse
Instead of seeing the word LILO it shows
XXXX
Instead of reporting your CPU type and speed in megahertz, you will see
AMD Athlon with 2000 pounds per square inch of biting pressure
The desktop randomly says "Crikey. Look at the size of that one!"
The distro will be released under the GPL, however you must pay heaps of money to a team of rugby league players every week.
The suggestion that Tel$tra might resent Micro$ofts monopolistic rent seeking price practices is so ironic that it is not even ironic (as Baldrick would say).
Tel$tra's business practices make Micro$oft seem a paragon of open access in comparison. Telstra is little more than a revival of the old (and justly reviled) Roman practice of tax farming, and it's massive profits come at the expense of decent information infrastructure and impose a disproportinate economic cost.
Of course there are many Telco's around the world who similarly abuse their monopoly control of the local loop. Governments should wake up and realise that Telecoms constitute startegic infrastucture and that the short term windfalls that might arise from the creation of private monopolies and cartels come at the expense of massive flow on costs to the economy as a whole through communication costs being much higher than they should be.
If we privatised all roads and allowed them to be run by gigantic vertically integrated transport conglomerates with no restrtictions on their prices the result would not be difficult to predict, a starving economy dominated by hugely profiatable transport congomerates. To see what this looks like one has only to go to modern day afghanistan, the ubiquotous "toll gates" are the sign posts of an economy there are no public goods exist and the result is a diminishing of private goods as well.
....but the slick installer has definitely arrived. I am a Debian kind of guy but I recently had the opportunity to install Redhat 7.3. I must say that its polish took my breath away.
Of course, once my install was complete, I discovered that a simple thing like locking the desktop was not visible on the desktop (annoying - it was in the desktop menu) and didnt work anyway (grrr! I guess I'll have to see which package needs to get installed. Even more annoying was the fact that it didnt let me know that it failed due to a missing package - it just did nothing.)
I also looked at the Debian Woody instaler. The fact that I could select from so many locales had me impressed too (I'm sure this will win points with multinational corporations), but a graphics mode install like Redhat's would definitely impress the unitiated more.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Sensible companies have methods to centralise document storage and management.
Terminals in business are commodities. Paying a premium for all the features in Windows is expensive.
Does every terminal need Digital camera capabilities when you've got 100 terminals in the room?
When every penny counts the case for sticking with windows for the clients grows harder. If you've invested in servers you can probably keep those going while you phase in alternatives.
A feature rich client is an expensive extravagance.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I don't think the majority of the Linux community are anti-corporate per se, they tend to be anti-corporate-abuse from what I can see. Obviously just about any useful tool can be used for evil as well as good.
The advantage of open source software (including BSD, etc) is that it is apt (or can be made apt) for your purposes as opposed to someone else's, while the advantage of libre software (GPL and other "strong" licenses) is that it's resistant to abuse in certain common ways, albeit sometimes at some cost in flexibility.
Those are the things which make Linux appeal to the rebels out there, and even if one Evil Empire or another adopts it as well, those advantages will still accrue to the Light Side also.
Hypocrites. They still do not support linux for their cable - remember that Telstra is Aussie for Telecommunications monopoly. Not only is linux not supported - it is against the usage policy to use anything other than the bigpond login client to connect to the bigpond cable network. Since they only have a wintel client , linux is actually banned.
Doens't matter, don't let it fool you, Telstra are an evil monopoly, they are the microsoft, of australia, they inflate broadband prices to absolutly insane levels and inflict us all with 3 gig (thats right, 3 gig) a month for horrendous amounts of money and with absolutly no stability, dont let this ever make you think telstra are a decent company, visit www.whirlpool.net.au for more info on how they exploit there monopoly posistion in australia to keep broadband prices high
Microsoft IIS is to webserving as KFC is to healthy eating
Telstra wouldn't bother producing anything that a prestigious publication like Eweek says there is no interest in would they?
So they will have, what, 1 year of unprecidented employee productivity before all the popular games are ported to Linux.
Maybe these businesses are bringing up the L word so that MS will drop their prices.
Some quick thoughts about Microsoft, and Linux. First, Microsoft, as the
richest company in the world, HAS to keep INCREASING profits. A company
that has made so much money for its stockholders has to not just keep
making money, but increasing profits. Its the nature of our economy. If
you're not growing, you're not making money for your shareholders.
This is maybe true only more recently, where dividends are less and less
the reason that people invest in corporations. People invest because they
expect the market value of their shares to increase. (especially with
Microsoft, who IIRC doesn't pay dividends to shareholders)
Microsoft has accumulated so much cash, so quickly, that if they don't
continue to do so, their stock value will go down.
I don't write this as justification...Just something I thought about when thinking about why MS would be so aggresive with new licensing and pricing strategies.
On a completely different, but relatively ONTOPIC subject, I think that
corporations judgement of Linux as a desktop OS has so much to do with the
window manager, especially KDE. Not to start any flame wars here, but I
think more minimalistic window managers (while not as attractive) have the
potential to be much more simple and stable on the desktop. (And much more
customizable). People say KDE is customizable, but I think its very
difficult to do correctly. With something like blackbox, and a simple file
manager, it can be very easy to create custom desktop PC's with options
only for the apps you are supporting. If this is a desktop PC, all you
need is a right click menu with OpenOffice, some email app, and a web
browser.
As others have noted, this is probably just a ploy to get a better price from Microsoft. I wouldn't be surprised to see an announcement, in a new months, that Telstra have negotiated a new five year deal with Microsoft.. and Smith is no longer CIO.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Don't they know that Linux is a geek OS that's already dead on the desktop?!
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Sounds like Telstra is going after some MS licencing discounts. End of story.
> Gnome and KDE are the obvious choices, but what
;)
> kills linux (for the newcomer) is the
> overabundance of choice! Abiword, Kword,
> OpenOffice, StarOffice, Applix (if they are still
> around).
How is the matter of abundant selection going to hinder corporate adoption? It's not. In a corporate environment, users don't have any choices. Do you honestly think I'd CHOOSE to use Outlook 98 as my corporate e-mail client? Hardly! The average bloke in most organizations gets to choose whatever the folks in the server room stick on the box. Large scale corporations have IT departments that are responsible for making the decisions about which software makes it onto the desktop and what does not. Nobody, not even the CEO, gets to use Eudora when the rest of the company is committed to Lotus Notes or Outlook.
Choice is a good thing and is nothing *but* a good thing.
What the killer is, of course, is interoperability with MS products. I'd love to have a 100% Exchange Server-compatible NON-Microsoft mail client available for free (as in beer). That might convince me to attempt to do the OpenOffice on Linux thing that I've dreamed about for years.
As for work versus home use, I agree that few people will bother to upgrade to Linux from, say, Windows Me. Why? Because no matter how you slice it, the vast majority of computer users in this century are almost completely computer illiterate. It takes some brain power, confidence and familiarity to make Slackware, for example, install on a Compaq 3200 Series system that was only ever intended to run with Windows Me.
What do Joe Average and Suzy Creamcheeze do when their system goes south for the winter? Grab that QuickRestore CD-ROM and get the box running the way it was from the factory! Even if they don't know what they're doing, they know that much. The interface is familiar and that's all that matters.
Now, when you're talking IT guys and assorted geeks, they (like me) will have been using Linux on their own time long before it finds its way into a dark corner of the server room or, God forbid, sees actual desktop use in the main office.
When you talk of people en masse adopting Linux in the home, you need to have an installation routine that does all the hardware probing, configuration, etc. better than Windows. And even more importantly than that, when something does need its own driver, there'd better be some Linux drivers staring 'em in the face.
That's the world of Joe Average and Suzy Creamcheeze, folks.
That said, if/as/when Slack's installation routine changes much from where it is now, I'll be gravely disappointed. After 7 years of Slack, I can't imagine doing it any other way.
Well, I guess the customers would just pay a little more so they don't go broke.
AOL doesn't offer Linux service (much less support) to their customers, yet their internal network has thousands of Linux boxes and every day I get AOL job announcements looking for Linux, Perl, and MySQL workers. I don't really expect the "front end" to look like the "back end", though I certainly do not have an AOL account!
In practice, it's operated like a private monopolist for about a decade now.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Let Raster "Linux is dead on the desktop" roll this up and smoke it.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
The great thing about linux in an enterprise is the ability to use file systems in a much more dynamic way versus NT. Doing a large scale deployment under Linux you could mount the whole damn system via NFS with a single CDROM in the drive to start the system boot. By pooling all the drive space and perhaps integrating many processes to run in a distributed fashion you could increase performance on a large scale.
/Home/Boot/MachineDrive and /Home/Boot/Personal. The /MachineDrive was the dynamic install of the OS, user's terminals would mount that in the boot process as root and such (I am not a Linux guru so I don't know if other mount points were also loaded from there). The /Personal became the normal /Home/USERID. The wicked thing was when you booted the system you picked what version you wanted to load for your machine (If you were on a Dell GX you could load CAD, OFFICE, ACCOUNTING) and walla! it mounted and booted from the network drive. They setup a local swap file and did some cache tricks and then as an additional layer when you logged in it mounted additional mount points so you has access to the applications you were supposed to have. It was the coolest thing I had seen. I hope these aussie-types do a good implementation. This could become a huge black eye for Linux if they have problems. The community better give them a hand. Business' here in the states WILL be watching with a critical eye.
BUT (Love that word, it encompasses all that is real, there is always a 'but' looking around) with centralization comes less points of failure and failures become exponentially more damaging as the points of failure diminsh.
The ideal usage that I have found for Linux in a corporate desktop environment is as such: Linux is effective as a hybrid Thin Client with applications running (and or cached) on the local client much like the old dumb terminals. With applications parsed between a application server and the local client, plus utilizing the clients as execution nodes for distributed tasks Linux as a desktop OS has a great amount of potential.
One of my old clients has a setup with a master data server with a drive structure of
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Everybody understands that this is the traditional accepted way of asking Microsoft for a discount, right?
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
As a StarOffice 6.0 reseller..
:-
,Shwag)
We have
* No access to site licencing
* No OEM product
* No Marketing Tools (Posters, Leaflets, Handouts
We have lost heaps of tenders and quotes because we were just unable to provide site-licences!
Oh yeah, sure, lets just send our business over to Sun so they can take the business that we advertised and marketing for.
Basically, Sun think the product is SO good, it will sell itself.
When I try and get Staroffice into retailers, it pales in comparison to just have a box on the shelf, when their shop is plastered with A1 and A0 Office XP posters that MS gave them.
it's called MultiDesk
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Linux on the desktop at home is no different than at the office.
It all depends on what applications you want or need and how much you are willing to pay.
And, Linux on the desktop has come a very long way. And, with Lindows, Xandros and apparently RedHat getting into the act, Linux on the desktop will improve significantly.
The old Linux versions were pretty much limited to a corporate environment where some high paid expert was required to set it up for use.
That is no longer the case.
Witness Lindows Click-n-Run. You may not want Lindows for your own machine but you will not find an easier way to install thousands of software applications. Of course, you can get most is not all of them on CDs. But, how are you going to get a new application next week or next month? Get another CD?
Lindows has illustated a very important concept for Linux. And, the concept is not simply an easy to install system. Rather the concept is that the many Linux distributors will be working hard to develop easier systems to use. And, no one distributor is going to be restricted by some idiot at the top nixing something that is not decided to be forced upon everyone.
That simply means that Linux is in a situation to deliver a full range of distributions. Some extremely difficult by high powered. And, some extremely simple to use.
And, "extremely simple to use" is going to be the key to putting Linux on the desktop. It will not be the power machines. It will be the simple to install, simple to use and simple to install additional software systems that will be the key.
If RedHat does not do it, Xandros will. If Xandros does not, Mandrake will. If Mandrake does not, Lindows will. On and on.
The desktop market is completely different than the server market.
But, Linux has a clear advantage in the desktop market. It is a different advantage than in the server markets, but it is a real one.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
Know what would be really cool? If all these companies that use Linux to save millions of dollars would each hire one or two full-time open source developers to advance the cause (Helping save them more money down the line.). HP has lead a good example with their shining support of PERL, time for us to encourage others to follow.
The article says that the company is considering Linux for the machines "supporting" their 45,000 or whatever desktops. As I read it, this is something very different that deploying Linux on each of them, and probably refers instead to the company's internal servers.
They *do* talk about the company evaluating StarOffice as a replacement suite for their desktops, though, which to me makes it even more clear that they plan to continue to run Windows.
I've just checked you kind of scenario and
the cell doesn't have to be reselected with multidesk.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
If you were a reseller why didn't you speak to someone from SUN? That would be interesting to know as well.
What the hell is up with the name calling?
How can you say its not ready for the desktop when it *is* being used for desktop systems?