HP charts Linux course
Published: 04 Dec 2003 12:40 GMT
IBM has not indemnified, because it considers the suit groundless. Why even dignify SCO's charges by saying you're going to indemnify against this risk?
The analyst and customer reaction was positive. The only place I got a couple of negatives was in the open-source community, which had that reaction -- that we were dignifying the SCO suit. At the end of the day, when you step into the chief information officer's shoes, he doesn't care if the suit is groundless or if we're dignifying or not dignifying. He cares about, "will I get sued and incur costs?" What HP is doing is providing protection against those costs. The challenge to IBM: If the suit is groundless, why don't you just indemnify?
Have you actually won sales as a result of indemnification?
I'll give you one scenario in the financial-services industry. On the day of our announcement, the CIO of a major company was about to issue a purchase order to IBM. The announcement came out, and he said, "we have to go rethink." The purchase order was blocked purely on the basis of our indemnification.
Some in the open-source community say the Novell acquisition of SuSE is a sign that the industry is becoming bureaucratised. What's your take?
I consider myself part of the open-source community. The (Linux) community has to recognise that it can't have it both ways. Linux cannot be a hobbyist's toy and be the leading operating platform in the industry at the same time. Those two things are incongruent. For Linux to become a credible part of the enterprise, it has to go through the standard evolution and maturing process. We saw some consolidation. It's MBA 101 here -- any new market goes through a whole bunch of little players; then there's consolidation. That's what's happening with Linux. I really like the idea that we now have two strong, powerful players that can compete vigorously.
How would you characterise Linux sales, in terms of hardware?
The vast majority is on Intel x86 servers. We're also seeing sales on Itanium, especially for large supercomputing applications. There's an airport whose approach control system is HP Linux on Itanium. Right now, Linux is definitely the leader on Itanium. HP is not all about Linux. We're about multiple operating systems. Our analysis shows that 85 percent of enterprises have multiple operating systems. The idea of saying, "the world is about Linux" is not the real world. The real world is, "you've got to have a strong Linux solution, but you've also got to have Windows and Unix." Our Systems Insight Manager (formerly Nimbus) is a platform that looks across the whole thing.
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