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Unilever Ditches Global IT Linux Migration
GP writes "One to stir the open source debate. The CIO of global consumer goods giant Unilever says in this interview with silicon.com that the company has ditched plans to migrate its enterprise IT platform to Linux running on Itanium. He reckons hidden support costs and security issues have emerged over the past two years with open source and that proprietary vendors have also raised their game in response to the 'threat'."
It pains me greatly to see such a respected multi-national organization to shy away from a large-scale Linux deployment.
My guess, is that won't bring unwanted attention to their IT iniatives and its strategic partners were probably not well-versed in Linux support and enhancements.
But I'm certain that other conglomerates will continue to see Linux as a true reliable OS.
Which is nice.
"support costs and security issues"
And what of the costs of lock-in, and giving up freedom?
I'm not a big company but I often choose slightly 'worse' free/open source software in comparison to closed source simply because I value and put a premium on freedom.
You've got to weigh the pros and cons and be pragmatic - but I'd lean towards the free(dom) choice since it seems freedom is often undervalued.
That's not the point. The point is, what do we care what they're running? It's about as useful as an article saying what OS I run.
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A few years ago, there's a need for a fair to middling department store chain to develop and deploy an epherimal business monitoring system. The current in place at six test stores is doing well and promises to provide detailed and instaneous headcount monitoring data to the central office which, when fully deployed and combined with sale pricing, inventory and geographical demographic data, offers an unprecedented degree of feedback to the decision makers. Consequently, the decision was made to give the project the go ahead.
In a nutshell, the current system listens to the infrared people detectors that go "bong" when people walk into the store and "bong bong" when people walk out, and feeds the data over the token ring to the store computer. But this won't do for the rest of the stores because they're using wireless networks.
The general idea thus becomes to make these systems wireless and functional out-of-the-box so that a store clerk can take it out of the packaging and situate the device near a source of power and within listening range of the people detectors. And since there was a great deal of buzz about achieving a lower TCO with Linux the company's "Linux on new installations" initiative meant they wanted to switch from Windows (used on the prototype machines) to Linux on the new devices to avoid per-site charges and network worms.
That's when things start going downhill -- not from an inherent flaw in Linux mind you, but from the fact that the original app was compiled Delphi and the compiler was in Norway with Jacques, the former IT developer, who returned to his family to work on their penguin conservation efforts (I imagine a matter of keeping the penguins fed and the polar bears fed with something else.) The current guy, a Linux enthusiast familiar with Wine, figures that instead of trying to rewrite the application from scratch it'd be quicker to wrap the Windows binary in a layer of emulation and wrap all that with a layer of Perl to interpret and route the results over the wireless network.
But the damnedest thing always seems to occur in these situations; it never takes as much time to rewrite as it does to kludge. Everything looks right after a week or so, functionwise -- these were embedded systems and therefore difficult to debug, but the development was done at a workstation that had a .wav recording of the "bong" sound that could be played into the
unit for testing. The system listens, transmits a byte over the wireless
when it gets a hit, and the central computer tabulates the data. No worries.
Except that nobody seems to be leaving the store. 0 counts for exits, average stay is 16 hours (from open to close.)
To say the guy was frantic at this point is an understatement. There were five days to go until the devices needed to be shipped to meet the deadline, and they're only half functional. To add to the problem there is now no time to rewrite, he's no good with a disassembler, and the embedded environment thwarts his further attempts at debugging.
Nevertheless he keeps at it. GCC/GLib are at stable versions, libraries are properly loaded as are the drivers -- indeed, the device isn't crashing and is able to speak with the network. He checked LKML, he stopped by #linux on EFnet, downgraded and upgraded the kernel all to no avail. His last resort was fervered e-mails to Jacques to see if he knew anything about the situation.
Fortunately, at the last minute Jacques was able to let him know what the problem was and that, in hindsight, it was both trivial and obvious, and everything ended up working out. But he swears that next time he'll start with a rewrite and leave the fancy stuff as a last option.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
So they were dead sure (for a while) that the right course was freakin' Linux on Itanium, and then they realized that of all the possible downsides of that combination, the straw that broke the camel's back was Linux!? WTF?
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
I work in a *very* big company (can't say right now, in the office... but we're possibly the biggest on Earth by at least one metric) and recently the focus is on LAMP for servers, intranets and databases.
If the company's that big, then you're pretty much guaranteed to have at least one of everything somewhere within the organization. No Fortune 50 company would standardize on LAMP for all of their systems either - it just doesn't scale well enough yet. MySQL in particular is a lightweight when compared to Oracle or UDB (or even PostgreSQL in many ways). In any case, the article is talking about their SAP system.
I worked for Unilever IT until quite recently.
There was never a serious itent to migrate to Linux. It was invoked more as a threat in 2004 to get big suppliers like HP and MS to cut prices when dealing with Unilever.
I guess it worked, and now Unilever can drop the pretense.
I have some cynical views. Going back to MS is the easy option and this is the direction that a Unilever or PHB in any large corporate would take. Once some concessions have been made by Microsoft they must be getting a good deal, and moving to another platform is hard work.
It is a general trend that large corporates don't pay the best, they have the brands you want to work on, they have the global opportunities, and the working enviroment is good. So why pay well as well. At the entry level of employment they get all the best grads with starry eyed hopes of working for their dream company, because of the other aforementioned pros and the experience that one gains at a giant market leader. Unilever is exactly like this, they recruit the best people, the good ones get pissed off pretty quickly and move on, leaving the not so agressive and/or not so hard working behind to get promoted trough to senior management.
I was amazed when Unilever made it's inital move to Linux, the move back to MS is not surprising at all to me.
This leaves small to medium enterprise to perfect and gain advantages from Linux, and they will and get good growth from it. Don't worry about poor old Unilever they will buy one of these more advanced smaller players and get dragged up to date at some stage.
God bless capitalism!
For those of you who haven't dealt with CIOs--like I have at company after company--the overwhelming vast majority of them don't know anything about technology. Some of them have never seen a line of code in their lives. They're money guys and they listen to the bean counters.
What I'm saying is that this decision is no reflection of the merits (or lack thereof) of Linux.
Why consider this? I don't know that much about the Itanium chip except that it was supposed to provide great FP performance (right?), and that it is (probably) a failure in the marketplace.
There are good reasons to stick with more standard hardware configurations.
The story sounds like a bit of a troll.
"My guess is that this guy didn't get his job because he's an idiot."
You've never heard of the Dilbert or Peter principles?
Anyone who says they're going to migrate their entire anything from one platform to another is a moron. Nothing to do with Linux, Itanium. Exactly the same would apply to Windows, AIX, OS X.
Deleted
I think the biggest reason (also in the article) is that the Open Source strategy played out very well for Unilever, in terms of getting cheaper software from providers like SUN, HP, etc. Maybe even Microsoft. 800 million IT budget is a large fish.
So did he find any penguins in Norway yet?
See, you'd think that would be stupid right? I mean, penguins in Norway?! But in fact one of the Norwegian army's sergeant majors is a penguin. No, really! The Norwegian army has penguin soldiers!
Jedidiah.
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