Linux in Enterprise Environments

watzinaneihm writes "Eweek has an Article about how Linux is getting accepted in Enterprises.IBM is releasing Tivoli for Linux. CA released Unicenter for Linux a few months ago.I got rumours about rumours that HP might do something similar with Openview. " One for those of you who dress nicer than me.

Comments

Linux in the Marine Corps

[kryonD]

Linux is not just being considered, it's being used as a realistic, cost effective solution. See this presentation on what the Marine Corps now uses to manage its warehouse inventories. It's a bit old, but still very relevant as the system is being deployed here in Okinawa next month.

Not enough documentation

[Amsterdam Vallon]

As a developer, I'm asked on average of once or twice every year to suddenly pick-up a new technology and learn it within a couple weeks so that I can write a new program for release 6-12 months later as itself or jointly with the hardware guys.

When it comes to good, thorough documentation and API releases, I've always thought that this is an area where Linux is truly lacking. Hypothetically speaking, I think a coder learning Java for a new Windows P2P program that he must write would have a much easier time than a programmer who must learn Perl or C on his Linux box and create a network-intensive application that installs and runs the same way on all distributions of Linux, as well as Mac OS X.

I figure opinions from the "non enlightened", as many of you will probably call me, will help you to improve Linux, especially its documentation and user-friendliness.

Empirical Evidence

[DASHSL0T]

If anyone doubts Linux' inroads into the corporate environment, just read today's release from HP. HP now says they have 2 BILLION in annual revenue attribuatable to Linux. http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/030121/tech_hewlettpackard _linux_1.html

Financial Corps

[Anonymous Coward]

Large financial corps have been aggressively looking at clustering linux for future generation platform. All the work IBM and research facilities have put into clustering linux has proven it's reliable and scalable. There is no equivalent in on windows. How many windows clusters are listed in the top 100 supercomputing clusters?

Microsoft won't win in this area for several reasons. Large grid and clusters sometimes require really low level tweaking to optimize performance. When you start getting into shared memory architecture, windows is still 10 yrs behind. Plus, the researchers and high end computing need access to source code to tweak and optimize. Microsoft is it's own worse enemy in this area. MS effectively locks themselves out of the supercomputing world due to their business practices.

CmdrTaco dress code

[lovebyte]

CmdrTaco wrote:
One for those of you who dress nicer than me.

According to this pic that includes many people!

Re:Office productivity and visual basic.

[finkployd]

Before linux can EVER make it onto the desktop, somebody is going to have to come up with some type of scripting language besides C.

I'm going off this assumption that this is either a joke or troll, but in case someone actually thinks this:

(1) C is not a scripting language, never was, never will be.

(2) Scripting languages available and commonly used on Linux are Perl, PHP, tcl, shell scripts (bash, tcsh, csh, zsh, et al), Python, Java (I kind of lump that in with scripting languages), and a bunch of others I am forgetting.

If you specifically mean Visual Basic, no it does not exist for Linux. Clones of VB do but probably are not exactly the same.

Finkployd

Re:Office productivity and visual basic.

[syle]

Yes, because if there's one place where Linux is lacking, it's that there are not enough scripting languages.

Re:Microsoft TCO makes linux success inevitable

[salesgeek]

Since you brought up the TCO model, let's follow this through. The logic is that MS is increasing TCO annually while providing little improved capabilities. This is 100% correct but isn't where the real TCO problem is. Microsoft's hitting us with 4%-5% per year in increase. The real problem is that in most enterprises you have over 22 business systems drawing resources and contributing to the sprial (they even sometimes require you implement more MS stuff):

* Desktop OSes
* Server OSes
* Messaging (mail servers)
* Databases
* Office Suites
* Web Servers
* Enterprise Network Management (Tivoli/Unicenter)
* Accounting (sometimes ERP usurps this)
* Order Entry
* Billing (it's amazing how few comapnies use their accounting systems for cutting invoices)
* eCommerce
* Content Management
* Inventory Management
* Manufacturing (MRP)
* Sales Force Automation (sometimes CRM)
* Helpdesk
* Customer Service Automation (sometimes CRM)
* Internet Browsers
* Groupware (outlook, groupwise or notes)
* Misc. Productivity Apps (project management, CAD, graphic design, etc)

It seems to me that the proliferation of business systems is really a core problem in ever-spiraling TCO. What really gets me is the ammount of patchwork integration out there. I think the root cause of the TCO spiral is that most managers missed the lecture about "Be very careful spending today's money to get ROI on past purchases!" It never ceases to amaze me how well protected lousy, non-integrated, buggy legacy systems are by the IT departments that foist them on the rest of the company.

I'd love to work with a company that wanted to shrink the number of systems from 22 to a more manageable number.

$G