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Indian Companies Embracing Linux Faster Than Ever

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the slicing-the-pie dept.

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."

2 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Re:KDE offers better Tamil, Hindi and Urdu support by MarkByers · · Score: 4, Interesting

    KDE is the leader when it comes to supporting the popular Indic languages like Urdu, Tamil, Hindi, and Bengali.

    If you could link to some statistics it might be interesting to see.

    According to Gnome's website.

    Gnome v2.14

    Hindi: 94.10% complete.
    Tamil: 66.64% complete.
    Benglai: 80.33% complete.

    According to the KDE's website:

    Kde stable:

    Hindi: 57.06% complete.
    Tamil: 66.13% complete.
    Bengali: 23.93% complete.

    --
    I'll probably be modded down for this...
  2. Stateless Linux by Chemicalscum · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Since this is a major integrated desktop and server deployment. It is an interesting question to ask is RH using its stateless Linux technology. It seems to me that the adoption of the approach is one factor that can drive a Windows to Linux desktop migration as is happening with LIC. The Fedora Project defines stateless Linux as:

    The Stateless Linux project is an OS-wide initiative to ensure that Fedora computers can be set up as replaceable appliances, with no important local state.

    For example, a system administrator can set up a network of hundreds of desktop client machines as clones of a master system, and be sure that all of them are kept synchronised whenever he or she updates the master system. We provide several technologies for doing this.

    This is an obvious improvement over the situation now when a legion of MCSE services the networked MS Windows fat (in fact boated or obese) clients. By adopting this technology a large corporation can avoid the even greater bloat that will be enforced by the Vista upgrade.

    It seems to me that there are three major approaches to the forthcoming corporate migrations to the Linux desktop by those corporations forward looking enough to want to avoid the cost and dislocations of the upcoming upgrades to Vista and who at the same time want to make cost savings and improve IT efficiency.

    1. There is the Novell approach which is to replace the Windows fat client by a better more cost effective Linux fat client, i.e. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

    2. There is the IBM approach which uses a Java Rich Client Platform (the Eclipse RCP) that is OS agnostic and which allows a smooth transition from Windows to Linux. This involves the Websphere based Workplace technology, the OOo based IBM productivity editors and new Hannover Notes client which runs natively on Linux.

    3. Finally there is the RH stateless Linux approach outlined above.