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Indian Companies Embracing Linux Faster Than Ever
cpatil writes "CNBC-TV 18 India has just announced that India's largest Insurance company, LIC(Life Insurance Corporation of India) sealed a deal with Red Hat to use its desktop and server software. LIC has roughly 160 Million customers, making it a non-trivial deal. Leslie D'Monte over at rediff also has a closer look at Linux deployment in India."
As an Indian, I am quite surprised that they went with an offering from Red Hat. Red Hat has long been known to support GNOME as their main desktop. However, KDE is the leader when it comes to supporting the popular Indic languages like Urdu, Tamil, Hindi, and Bengali.
I myself use the Tamil support of KDE, and have long found it superior to that of GNOME (even for recent releases). More of the core KDE applications have translations available, and most of are a higher quality than those of GNOME. That is not to say that GNOME is unable to support those languages; that is clearly not the case! The fact remains, however, that KDE is the better option at this time when it comes to displaying Indic scripts, and offering Indic translations.
Not true. Speaking from first hand experience in both countries, linux usage in India is much higher than in America both in the home and office. There have been a number of genuine large-scale Windows-to-linux switches, as opposed to just talking about it or migrating a dozen servers in a corner somewhere. The average bank clerk (my mom included :-) is actually using linux terminals on a day-to-day basis.
LIC India was one of the largest users of Unix (SUN Solaris) systems prior to this announcement. They had trained Unix sysadmins and tape backup systems in 1998. Long before such an official announcement was made many of the client machines connecting to the servers were being switched to Linux even at regional offices. This time Redhat is migrating the servers too to Linux. So that in a sense is the corporate world beginning to embrace Linux.
Adding to this, Reliance Infocomm Ltd., one of the largest CDMA service providers does provide a rather clumsy, yet workable tool for dialing-up internet using their phones. They try to address a small but existent Linux Desktop market. There are OEM PCs that ship with TurboLinux desktops in India from many manufacturers.
However, the largets ATM chains, SBI - State Bank of India (now on a week long strike) and several other institutions continue to use flavors of legacy old systems including Microsoft Win32 platforms. Home users are most uncomfortable switching to Linux despite the arrival of Ubuntu/Kubuntu and other easily configurable alternatives. There is still much to be done. The transition is slow but definitely happening in the market, and that's the good news.
As for outsourcing blah, that's irrelevant to the article. Service firms adopt platforms that can put them in business with their clientele. That's business sense and they keep doing it.
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
Windows users are running whatever came installed on their Dell/Gateway/HP machine. :- Pune Linux User Group (Pune is a mid size city in central india.) have very less resistance in installing linux on the PC's we find at our grasp as long as whatever software the person wanted the pc for is provided on linux. Games are the most problamatic feature of a standard windows pc however and we so far have no solution for it. Transgaming/wine are all ok but unfortunately they don't garuntee all the games on a "1500 games mania" dvd bought for under 500Rs (20USD) will run.
You don't really get India mentality. Nobody (consumers atleast) buys dell/hp/gateway except for laptops. Most of the machines delivered at homes are hand assembled by local supplier who buys motherboards and other stuff in bulk. They have zero knowledge and just install pirated copies of windows to "test" the machine and deliver.
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