IBM hopes to have 40,000 Linux desktop users within the
company by the end of the year, said an IBM executive at the Open
Source Business Conference in San Francisco.
About 15,000 of IBM's 300,000 employees have moved to the Linux
desktop, said Scott Handy, IBM's vice-president of worldwide Linux
strategy and market development.
While Handy believed the Linux desktops cost IBM less than the
$5,000 to $7,000 a year analyst firms typically ascribe to the
maintenance of Windows systems, the switch to a Linux PC may not be
a great deal for everyone.
In many cases, the added cost of testing and supporting a second
desktop is enough to make it more expensive for many companies to
add Linux.
IBM has created an Open Client Assessment programme, initially
designed to help customers move their desktops from Windows to
Linux, but IBM discovered ways for customers to reduce costs by
keeping their Windows desktops, and the programme is now focused on
moving customers toward server-centric applications, regardless of
desktop platform, Handy said.
In January, a memo from IBM chief information officer Bob
Greenberg challenged the company to move to a Linux-based desktop
by the end of 2005. The company has formed an internal initiative,
called the Open Desktop project, to facilitate the move.
IBM is not developing its own desktop distribution for the
project. The company's desktops will be based on standard Linux
distributions from both SuSE Linux and Red Hat.
Outside of its Open Desktop project, IBM has more than 600
people in 43 locations working on 150 open-source projects, Handy
said.
Linux on the server is, increasingly, being accepted in the
enterprise as a platform for application consolidation and, more
recently, for running enterprise applications such as those from
SAP.
"There are now more than 2,000 installations of [IBM] customers
in production with Linux on SAP," he said. "A lot of people are
doing enterprise applications here."
Handy also disputed claims by SCO that IBM was trying to destroy
the economic value of Unix by promoting Linux. In a shrinking Unix
market, IBM's Unix-based pSeries sales have grown, in part, because
of its Linux campaign.
"We made Linux an issue in the agenda of customers," he said.
This gave IBM an advantage over Unix rivals such as Sun
Microsystems, which were slower to adopt Linux, he said. "Customers
who wanted to talk about Linux couldn't talk to Sun about it."
Robert McMillan writes for IDG News Service