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Kenwood Chooses Linux Over NT for ERP
Structured Audio writes "Kenwood America (the speaker maker) has moved from Pick to Linux for its enterprise resource planning
apps. This Techweb article explains why Kenwood chose Linux over NT or a commercial Unix." ERP and financials are among the most important areas for Linux and open source to shine if they are to be accepted by the corporate world.
First of all, Perl is not a `product'. That's MBA talk. Perl is a program. Sometimes it's a toy. Sometimes it's a joy. Sometimes it's a way of life. :-)
What is seeping through around the edges is the same discomfort you would see if you stuck a quiet math major into a vat full of business majors or jocks.
As a kid, I always threw out the sports section and the business section of the paper, sight unseen. It was the science and technology sections, and magazine, which appealed to me. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I'd now find more the stuff about computers in the business section than the science section. And yes, I do keep the business section now -- it's got Dilbert on the front page. :-)
You'll find that amongst hard-core programmers--those for whom programming is a game, computers a toy, and who see computer science as having no more to do with computers than has astronomy to do with telescopes--the whole business thing is often an annoyance. Experience constantly shows that programmers as a group mistrust business people in general, especially marketing and sales types, whose job programmers perceive as lying. If you expect to be taken seriously by a programmer, you don't show up in a suit and tie. This strong mutual dislike makes it very hard to run certain kinds of business, but keeping engineering in a different building than marketing certainly helps. :-)
There are some folks who do computers because they're trying to make a buck. You know the types. "MIS majors", people who are on their way to MBAs. They seem computers as a means to an end: money. These are folks whose idea of a career in computers leads to some sales job or managerial position.
Real programmers also see computers as a means to an end. It's a complete different end. And most of us think it's just nifty that we get paid to do what we'd just be doing anyway for fun. Yes, the different end is to have fun programming. It's not something I expect business people to empathize with very much.
Remember the old joke:
If you haven't known "IT pro-fess-ion-als" who were mindless drones, then you are a lucky, lucky man. We used to call them secretaries, librarians, or data entry clerks. Now they're "IT professionals". Give me a break.It seems to me that this is a very brave move by Kenwood. Quoting from the article:
In other words, they first decided on Linux and only then they try to find a software package. Very brave, given the uneven support for Linux among the vendors.
What ERP packages support Linux?
Is this the start of a new trend? Companies goes Linux for the OS and the software applications will have to follow? That would be a Good Thing.
Hi!
Wow. Seems like, regardless whether there was any truth behind the Mindcraft "vindication" (and IMNSHO it is valid, much as I personally wish it wasn't), Linux still wins in more typical situations than Mindcraft used in their tests.
I remember a prof from my undergraduate years who took a serious amount of salt to any "benchmark" result or any single form of CPU performance measurement. His argument is simple: benchmarks, CPU measurements (like MIPS, MHz, etc.) are basically sticking a single number to complex system/device. There are so many parameters involved that sticking a number to something in this way is like collapsing a high-dimensional object into 1D and using that as a measuring stick.
This is the case with the Mindcraft benchmark (and any other benchmark for that matter) -- their results simply show that in a certain environment, under a certain configuration, Linux loses to NT. OT1H this simply means Linux has room for improvement, OTOH it says (close to) nothing about how Linux performs in other environments. And then you've got to take into account all sorts of other factors, like the cost of maintenance, the minimal required hardware, etc., that benchmark results hardly begin to take into consideration.
Well, my point is, while we're working on improving Linux so that it won't lose to NT in environments like Mindcraft's benchmark, we can rest assured that in general, Linux is better than NT, in terms of performance under typical environments, cost of ownership/maintenance, and giving desired performance on minimal hardware, etc.. This case simply proves this point. We've had many reports of this sort in the past, and I'm sure we'll be getting a lot more as people begin to realize the advantages of Linux.
As for FUD... slowly, as more and more people step out of the M$ realm and discovers that the "outside world" is not exactly like M$ would like to have them believe, I think FUD will eventually just become CCA (confidence, certainty, assurance).
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
Pick was originally developed as a business information tool that ran on bare hardware. Ports took months and were only available for a very few platforms. About 10 years ago, Pick and a number of clones (Ardent UniVerse, etc) began porting to Unix. In the past five years they ported to NT. Recently they ported to Linux.
The Pick environment runs as a shell on these Ports.
The problem with legacy Pick (like McDonnell Douglas) is that there is no connectivity to the outside world. The only way to get data into and out of it is via 9-track tape and serial port, typically. Any modern Pick shell running on Unix or NT would beat this easily. Can you say samba?
One of the features of Pick is it non-first-normal form database structure, using strings with delimiters to store all data. This is extremely flexible, and something that Kenwood is not going to leave. jBase incorporates this structure. They will probably be able to leave their application software largely unaltered.
Pick does have an interesting similarity to Linux. The early ports to Intel hardware had 8 serial lines running off a 286, blowing away DOS and Windows for speed.
Another interesting bit of trivia - this ancient McDonnell Douglas system incorporates the date windowing that was recently the subject of a patent. This isn't a recent development - they've been using this windowing for 25 years!
More info at the Pick FAQ