In his first 18 months as general manager of IBM's
worldwide Linux team, Jim Stallings has seen dozens of corporate
shops and governments around the world push Linux from the
periphery to the heart of their IT strategies - never a bad thing
for job security when you have the word 'Linux' in your
title.
But with the open-source operating system now more firmly
entrenched, the next challenge for Stallings and his team is to
help Linux drive IBM's companywide On Demand initiative deeper into
corporate accounts with one hand, while fighting the ongoing server
battle against Windows with the other.
An 18-year veteran of IBM before he left the company in 1996,
Stallings worked in several capacities with Big Blue including that
of vice-president in charge of worldwide sales for the AS/400
division. Upon his return in 2002, Stallings served as a vice
president in charge of IBM's integrated accounts division, and in
January 2003, assumed his current position.
A graduate of the US Naval Academy and former Marine captain,
Stallings took time to sit down with InfoWorld editor-at-large Ed
Scannell to discuss what roads he sees Linux traveling both in the
United States and around the world.
You have been running IBM's Linux operation for 18
months now. What have been the high points and low points along the
way?
I suppose I have some in both categories. What I am most struck
by, both in the US and outside, is the level of sophistication that
governments and major users have around Linux. First, every one of
them now has a Linux strategy in place, and they are mostly
long-term strategies.
They have gone from edge-of-network solutions to where they now
have dedicated application development machines, web services
machines, and they are pushing right into the middle of the
datacentre as fast as we can help them do that. I did not expect
them to move at this speed 18 months ago.
But it is not just the speed of adoption, but the size of the
businesses doing so. IDC and Gartner recently came out and said
Linux-based server shipments are approaching $1bn a quarter in
revenues.
That is largely on servers, what about the
desktop?
Well I had made some predictions that it would mature at a much
slower rate mostly because of the (lack) of applications. But with
companies like Novell, which acquired SuSE and Ximian, and Red Hat
now stepping up their (desktop) efforts, a lot of things are
starting to play out faster than I thought they might.
What do you think is the value-add Linux offers in on
demand environments?
If you look at some of the market projections for Linux out to
say 2007 or 2008 on the server side, user choices for operating
systems will be clearly either Windows or Linux. Windows will be
the de facto standard but it is declining, and Linux is emerging as
the fastest growing standard.
In 2007 there will be as many Windows server shipments as Linux
server shipments in that year. But the difference is, one is an
open operating system and the other is not. So where this matters
to on demand is the ability to be much more interoperable. So it is
not just about Windows or Linux, but about having an environment
where users can exploit the best of the applications and workloads
for either one of these environments.
So this support we have for Linux sets users up to really
exploit a lot of this open framework that is gradually becoming a
very big standard in the market. I think users will come to realise
they have great flexibility with this open environment for things
like different workloads and the fact they can consolidate them on
different types of servers and not have to recompile or rewrite.
That gives them a lot of flexibility and speed for on-demand
strategies and deployments.
What is the next natural evolution for Linux? Is it just
bigger, faster, stronger, or something not so obvious?
The bigger, faster, stronger piece for Linux is on a linear
path. It is becoming very resilient and as robust as
enterprise-class Unix. I see that continuing release after
release.
So far Linux has been growing by taking market share
mainly from Unix. Is that trend also continuing, or is it now
taking more share from Windows?
Clearly, for the last year or more is has been a Unix-to-Linux
migration, and it is also about moving primarily to Intel
platforms. But that is not the only story. The other story,
particularly in the enterprise side, has been consolidating on the
mainframes and things like our pSeries and iSeries, which, too, are
functioning more as consolidation platforms.
The other thing we are seeing is, over the past six months
Microsoft said that by the end of 2004 it would not support the NT
server. So a lot of the business partners like Novell came to us
and said "Hey let's give them an alternative such as a Linux
migration path." So we saw in the first quarter of this year some
60,000 of these migrations take place and it is still accelerating
in the second quarter.
Since Novell acquired SuSE and Ximian, what sort of
difference in the market have you seen? And has this placed any
added pressure on your relationship with Red Hat?
We have had a really good relationship with SuSE and that has
extended to Novell without any disruptions in that we have a lot of
the same channel partners. And there are still a lot of NetWare
machines supported by (IBM's) AS/400s. We obviously still have to
compete in markets where we have some common products.
But what is different is, users who were wondering about these
companies (SuSE and Red Hat) sustaining themselves financially
don't have to think about that any more. It has given Linux this
stamp of credibility and sustainability. Also, it gives users a
channel to go acquire Linux solutions. Prior to the acquisition
SuSE for the most part ran on our mainframes and non-Intel
platforms, and Red Hat ran on Intel platforms. Now, both run across
our entire server line.
In your recent travels to India, what sorts of things
have you picked up on regarding their use of Linux and what we
might learn from that in the US market?
In India what struck me was the enthusiasm with which the entire
ISV community is pursuing the expansion of their knowledge about
Linux and open standards, and how it could drive their future
growth.
The Indian (Linux) market itself is about $6bn a year, but they
are serving other markets, predominantly North America, that is
worth many billions of dollars more in services. So they are
thinking long term about the exportability of their applications
and the support they can bring to these other markets using the
infrastructure they have built.
So as in the United States, the services business there
is growing rapidly. As rapidly as the applications business
there?
Absolutely. And the reason is someone has to support all of this
new stuff going in. Linux-based software is going to require all of
the interdiction services, the maintenance support, as well as all
the help desk stuff. One of the things we actually helped them with
is the opening and design of their help center that supports 29
states plus the national government.
Are Indian-based companies learning how to run a
profitable businesses selling and supporting Linux-based
applications and services?
Absolutely. When we opened our Centre of Competency in
Bangalore, India, we had there four mid-size ISVs, all of which
were profitable. They sold into places like the banking and
government markets and they all had their products running on a
variety of different platforms. You have to remember that these
companies typically sell their products into the government and
commercial companies that are serving the external markets. We
aren't talking much about deploying Linux-based desktops into the
consumer base yet. We are talking about deploying Linux-based
desktops that run help desks that are supporting major airlines and
banks, who have outsourced that to India.
So how expensive is free software these days? As people
start to integrate more Linux-based systems into complex
heterogeneous environments, are service and support costs rapidly
rising?
Users are doing more with Linux than they have ever done, so
naturally the footprint for maintenance and support gets bigger. If
you look at our services business, (Linux) is several hundred
million worth of business and still growing. The services business
grew 89% year to year. But I would say that on a per server basis,
their users' prices are going down simply because, with larger
footprints, you can discount more.
Are you seeing more interest in Linux-based laptops and
other mobile devices among corporate users over the past year or
two?
Yes, and that is one area that gets overlooked a lot. It is
about 30 million systems with about 23 million desktops and seven
million servers. And if you count the embedded Linux devices, it is
in the neighborhood of one billion devices. So the area of the most
explosive growth are mobile devices that have some sort of
intelligent operating system sitting on a micro chip that is
connected back to a network and/or server.
Are you working more closely with Microsoft these days
to support Windows-Linux-Unix environments - or less
so?
That is a very important agenda item for them. I mean the whole
reason why Linux is becoming a choice for users is that they are
saying this isn't about one or the other, it is about both. So our
approach on this has been all about creating an open framework. You
will see this in our server shipments through our Squadrons
Initiative, where we are shipping our servers with OS/400, AIX,
Linux, and Windows so you can run different classes of workloads.
Users are making this a huge deal, and so it is something that
Microsoft is just going to have to deal with.
Ed Scannell writes for InfoWorld