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Midsize Businesses Not Considering Linux?
LukePieStalker writes "eWeek is running a
piece
about a research report which concludes that Linux is not even
on the radar screen for midsize businesses. The survey involved
over 1,400 executives of companies with annual revenue around $250 to
$500 million. It seems that, while smaller companies may see the
licensing savings as being significant, and larger companies have
the expertise to manage it, bringing Linux into a midsize Windows
shop creates a multiplatform organization which is prohibitively
complicated and expensive to manage. Unfortunately, companies of
this size comprise the bulk of American business. Quote: "Linux is
free, but the support for it is not.""
But get your credit card number and expiration date handy.
Or issue an open purchase requisition.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
I have professional dealins with many a mid-size company, and every single one of them has had some network service running under Linux somewhere.
It might be true that the management doesn't know, though.
Good news! Evolution for win32 is on the way! The last that I heard, Novell was even pushing a port directly.
Throw the bums out!
English saying: Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
Actually yes.
I worked for a wholesale/retail liquor store company that did about 300 million in sales a year with only about 30 total stores. They were not *BIG* but they weren't a small mom and pop business either.
They wouldn't have allowed Linux in their IT department either if I hadn't been there. I had the knowledge to do it. Even then, it only started with an email server and only because we had such trouble with our ISP's email services.
Unfortunately, companies of this size comprise the bulk of American business
I think that is incorrect. No matter how you measure it, small businesses are a larger component of the economy.
4 year old stats, but I don't think it's changed
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Seen that in action. For all but the most straightforward problems, that support is worthless.
To get to anyone knowledgeable for MS products, you've got to pay through the nose.
Did you actually read the article? Sure you don't need to pay for the OS but you have to pay someone to retrain the staff, covert applications, deploy it and administer it. If you've already got a MS centric solution that you've already paid for then why the hell would you want to create an unnecessary and far from cheap cost just to change OS for no real reason?
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
> But I find it hard to believe that they are
> not considering Linux.
We are. I would love to convert our shop to all-Linux tomorrow.
Problem is, mid-sized business use midrange apps. E.g. Forth Shift, Visual Manufacturing, etc. Which were written in the late 80s/early 90s. For the Windows API.
Changing out a business management system is no trivial task for a midsized company, and not undertaken lightly. If and when these midrange vendors compile Linux versions (web-based really doesn't work for high-volume ERP transactions), then we can look at moving to Linux. But unfortunately not before.
sPh
Not quite right.
100 % total - 27 % with linux = 73 % without
of whom 100 % total - 48 % not interested - 15 % unsure = only 37 % of those without linux are interested
73 % without linux x 37 % of them interested = 27 % without linux but interested
I agree with your general point though - 27 % use linux, and a further 27 % are interested in it. 54 % are either using linux or interested it it. That hardly qualifies as "off the radar"
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
I'm IT manager for a a relatively small company, with 20ish salespeople on the road, trying to sell our (one shot) product. My company uses exclusively linux (SuSE 9) servers except for our accounting software, about 20 (yep, 20) of them. mail, printing, file sharing, firewalls, VPN, ...
Well, we decided to outsource the appointment taking for our salespeople to another company and provide our salespeople with PDAs to sync with their calendars instantly because the less time they spend on the phone trying to get an appointment with customers, the more they sell, logical...
So I went shopping for some linux distro that actually provided outlook connectivity (these damn PDAs don't have anything but outlook on them it seems).
After being fooled by (SUSE) Novel OpenExchange and their advertised "Seamless integration" with Outlooks (from Outlook 98+, their website advertises), I had to come to the conclusion that there was seemingly no linux distro that provided that kind of functionality.
My solution is now either to get one of these windows boxen with exchange on it or outsource the calendaring connectivity as well...
This need of mine is a real need, and not just fancy wishes based on nothing but comfort as you seem to imply, after all our other 30ish employees are very happy with sunbird but in this case, it's not an option...
Oh, and by the way, the "outlook connector" of Open-XChange works on about 50% of the windows XP machines, not all of them...
These two aspects (accounting and calendaring) are the points that prevent me from providing linux on the desktop throughout the company, everyone already uses firefox, thunderbird, sunbird, OO.org(except for the odd excel thing openexchange can't handle). Linux is cool, but it's not yet fully ready for all my needs...
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
I'm the Director of IT for a $100 million dollar 'small' company, and we use Linux where we can. Where we *can't* use it effectively is on the desktop, or to replace our MS Exchange 2003 server (two of several examples). Reasons: Linux distros are *still* not ready for prime time on the desktop, and until we have a killer Linux desktop distro being preinstalled on Dell boxes, it's just not going to happen. As for Exchange 2003, Open Exchange, in all its flavors, is still not quite there from a functional standpoint. Yeah, I know I could get out my shoehorn and jam a Linux foot in my company's shoe, but frankly, it's not the right thing to do (yet). Still hoping...
If you don't understand the email/calender relationship, then you don't understand even the most basic parts of it.
Apart from the fact that people don't like having 5 or 6 apps running all the time and getting in the way (think alt-tab and having it cluttered with apps you have to run all day like email, calendering, etc.. to get full use out of them), email integration provides an eays way to invite and manage meetings.
I create a meeting and email the invites to the attendees. They click a single button to add that meeting to their calendar if they accept, or to decline (automatically informing MY calendar that they declined). If I reschedule the meeting, then everyone is automatically sent out reconfirmations, which again get automatically updated when accepted or declined.
With seperate calendaring, I have to manage the meetings (or assign someone to manage them). Integrated works much better.
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This has been Sun's argument for the last decade. The fact of the matter is it isn't true. Joe average users wants the ability to install his own software and use particular apps as much as the technical people do. They don't like administrative fascism any more than we do.
When they are given a locked down environment work tends to migrate off the locked down environment to a completely uncontrolled environment (home systems, personal laptops, PDA's, physical notebooks...). Now thin client doesn't require fascism in fact it can allow for more freedom if each user has liberal permissions in their home directory but the fact is this requires support.
There is no getting around high support costs and a high admin:employee ratio to actually support the business.
This has been Sun's argument for the last decade. The fact of the matter is it isn't true. Joe average users wants the ability to install his own software and use particular apps as much as the technical people do. They don't like administrative fascism any more than we do.
Um, it doesn't matter if they like it or not. They are using thier company's computers, not thier home computers.
Of course, depending on job function the user may ligitimatly need to install apps...but it should be locked down so that said apps can't screw up the rest of the network.
When they are given a locked down environment work tends to migrate off the locked down environment to a completely uncontrolled environment (home systems, personal laptops, PDA's, physical notebooks...).
And such systems should be completely denied from accessng the network.
Now thin client doesn't require fascism in fact it can allow for more freedom if each user has liberal permissions in their home directory but the fact is this requires support.
This is probably true, if you can install apps to your home directory. In windows you can't yet, but *nix obviously it can be done. Of course if the app they install screws up thier home directory files, you'll still have to fix it. So even in that case it might be wise not to allow it.
There is no getting around high support costs and a high admin:employee ratio to actually support the business.
Sure there is; lock their systems down.
You are right about the growing requirements of firewall solutions, but have a look at Astaro (http://www.astaro.com/). Linux based firewall/proxy/VPN appliance with a nice web front end.
I don't make predictions, and I never will.
I got a personal response from the two Microsft employees the last time I submitted a bug report to Microsoft. Of course you did. That's because what you submitted WAS NOT A BUG REPORT. You submitted a support request, and got responce from MS Support. In M$ world, end users certainly don't have authority to generate any bug reports. :) :) ) :)
Now, let me tell you how MS Support works. There are 3 levels of support: First level (the normal run of the mill telephone drones), Second level (so called "mentors") and Third level (that's where the actual M$ employees are) . First two levels ARE NOT M$ EMPLOYEES - they are outsourced. When a normal Joe wants support, he deals only with the first two levels - third level only trains and supervises (and drinks - my supervisor was a genuine alcoholic
The support drones of both levels have acces to certain internal M$ tools, one of which is a bug report system. That system is there only to mislead the drones into believing that the bugs they find (and they do find - lots of them) get looked at by the programmers. Once upon a time, my suprviser slipped, and told me the bug report system is irrelevant, and the reports are discarded. And believe me, it fit the picture perfectly
Basically, if a user calls with a problem that is caused by a bug, he is either provided with a workaround, or gets his 35$ back (each support case is 35$). The only way a bug gets fixed is if it's discovered by a corporate ("pro") support client (we're talking millions of dollars here). Bug fixes generated for these clients also get distributed to the ordinary Joes.
I hope that explains the elightened M$ support phylosophy.
They talked to "IT Managers", at my last job (a midsized company revenues of about 500m/yr) we had 20 servers in the racks, 10 were windows and 10 were linux, and we were migrating everything we could over to linux as quickly as possible, file servers, web servers, intranet, database, the only thing windows was still doing was print servering because our printers didn't have a reliable linux driver...
Anyway, my point is that the IT Manager didn't have a clue what we were running. He said "Make x happen with $y". Often times (we're talking 99-01 here) the $y was prohibitively small to achieve anything with windows... IE, smaller than a single license for windows 2k server. So being good admins and programmers we figured out ways to make x happen without spending any money (or spending very little). This actually was well rewarded in the form of bonuses and stuff (the company was good about taking care of their people). If they called my old IT Manager he said "we're using windows" cause that's whats on his desktop, and he doesn't know the difference between samba, php, apache and windows, asp, and iis. He doesn't see the difference cause we did our jobs right.