The "Lintel" Value Proposition
by Lenny Liebman (11/12/99; 9:00 a.m. ET)
Open source is an interesting concept, but it's the business case that counts
Bring up the topic of Linux, and most people will start talking about the pros and cons of open source software. Linux zealots will rant with fervor about how software is "supposed" to be written and promulgated. Corporate IT managers who sense something vaguely Marxist about such rantings may, in turn, find themselves disinclined to embrace the upstart OS, because the last thing they want to do is become a combatant -- and therefore a potential casualty -- in any sort of revolution.
All of this is an unfortunate distraction, because if you talk to IT managers who are actually deploying Linux in their businesses, they won't talk about software liberation or the defeat of Microsoft or the means of production being in the hands of the programmers. They'll talk pure capitalism: more value for less money.
And the value they'll talk about has little to do with the cost of the OS itself. It's the performance they get from their hardware that counts.
"Using Linux, I can get the same performance from a server with dual Pentium IIs as I can from a dual-processor UltraSparc," says Tom Schenk, systems administrator for Internet-content portal DejaNews. "That's a threefold price/performance increase."
Petroleum giant Amerada Hess has experienced even greater savings. By replacing its mainframe with a 96-PC cluster of Dell servers running Linux, the company was able to drastically reduce its CPU costs. "Our mainframe cost us about $2 million including maintenance fees, and our Linux system cost us about $400,000," explains senior systems programmer Jeff Davis. "But we get three times the processing power now, so the overall price/performance improvement is 15X."
Linux not only is able to deliver high performance from low-cost, Intel-based commodity hardware; it also provides greater reliability and stability than comparable NT servers. This reliability has become particularly critical in the online world, where service interruptions have become less tolerable than ever. "When you're serving up a quarter of a million page hits a day, you simply can't afford to lose time rebooting machines," asserts Adam Green, chief technology officer at news and content provider Andover.Net. "With Linux, we can go for months without having to take a server down for maintenance."
A recent survey from Datapro confirms these early Linux adopters' views. According to the poll, Linux ranked just ahead of Sun Solaris and significantly ahead of Windows NT in both performance and reliability. And as companies install newer, more powerful processors to scale up applications across the enterprise, they're finding that Linux can breathe life into their older, otherwise-doomed machines -- allowing even ancient 486 PCs to continue operating as DNS or FTP servers.
Thus the Linux phenomenon might better be termed "Lintel" -- to reflect the importance of the open source OS's performance on Intel boxes and to contrast it with the closely knit Wintel platform that has dominated the '90s. It's this performance and stability that attract users to Linux, not the fact that it's basically free.
Open Source Logistics
Of course, to gain the performance that Linux offers on Intel processors, one must understand the principles of and be willing to operate in the world of open source software. Basically, under the open source paradigm, no single vendor controls the development, licensing or distribution of the operating system. The source code is published openly. Developers are free to modify the code for their own purposes as they see fit. They also can publish such modifications -- which may include improvements to core processes, added administrative utilities, device drivers and so on -- to the Linux user community at large. Other developers are then free to review, use and modify those modifications.
For obvious reasons, this process can seem frighteningly chaotic to an IT manager who is accustomed to purchasing proprietary, controlled-release software from conventional vendors. In fact, one of the first questions that occurs to the uninitiated is how such a process could possibly result in an OS that can compete with the likes of those from Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, which have gone to a great deal of trouble to hire and retain large armies of developers.
Here's how DejaNews' Schenk answers that particular question: "You've got network drivers that come from a researcher at NASA, and serial interfaces that come from someone at MIT," he observes. "If you put the best talent in the world together, I think it's clear that you're going to come up with a pretty good product." The Linux community at large also acts as a very efficient quality-control system, with code problems quickly -- and publicly -- surfacing in discussion groups and on Web sites across the Net. It's interesting to note that Microsoft takes a similar approach to this type of quality control when it aggressively pushes beta versions of Windows 2000 out to its customers so they can do prerelease troubleshooting.
Then there's the issue of support. If nobody sold it to you, who's responsible for answering your questions? Again, within the open source movement, this traditionally has been the job of the community as a whole. User questions are posted in open forums and answered by community participants with the requisite expertise. It's a system that has worked well -- especially considering that most conventional vendors' support mechanisms leave much to be desired. "We all know what it's like to call a Tier 1 support person and then have your problem escalated, which means you end up waiting a day for a Tier 2 person to call you back," says Hess' Davis. "But with Linux, I've been able to find just about everything I've needed myself in the newsgroups."
Corporate customers' requirements for support, quality assurance and version control have given rise to Linux "distributors" such as Red Hat, Caldera Systems and VA Research. These companies handle the packaging and help-desk tasks necessary to make a Linux purchase look more like a conventional software transaction, with accountability and services thrown into the deal. Thus, while the development of Linux continues to take place under the principles of open source, these vendors allow IT managers to deal with the OS in a way that's similar to how they deal with typical, proprietary products.
The Package
When it comes down to it, though, buyers aren't as interested in OSes as they are in business applications and solutions. So the real issue affecting the adoption of Linux by mainstream corporations is how much support it gains from commercial software developers.
To some extent, this is one of those chicken-and-egg issues. Developers don't want to write applications to a platform that corporate customers aren't embracing. And corporate customers won't embrace a platform unless they find compelling applications that run on it.
That's why garnering developer support is another important mission for the new Linux distributors. By surrounding Linux with development resources such as database-integration tools and links to network print services, these distributors are making the development of Linux-based applications easier and encouraging independent software vendors and value-added resellers to offer products that include the OS as part of a high-value "turnkey" package.
The idea isn't to sell corporate customers a $59 Linux retail product, but to have them buy Linux as part of a larger solution that meets some specific business need," explains Ransom Love, CEO of Caldera Systems. "In many cases, the customer might not even realize they're buying a Linux product at all. They just know they're getting a good deal on software that does what they want it to do."
That's exactly what happened with Cendant Hotels, the Phoenix-based unit of parent Cendant, which runs several leading chains -- including Ramada Inn and Howard Johnson. When the company sought an effective, inexpensive hotel management system that it could give its franchisees, it found a Linux-based product called Front Desk, from Hotel Software Systems. "We didn't make a conscious decision to move to Linux," says Cendant VP of IT Scott Gibson. "But the cost of the software and the fact that we could run it on inexpensive hardware were attributes of Linux that made the product itself attractive to us."
Greg Gianforte, president of Right Now Technologies, which markets a Web-based customer service application that runs on Linux, agrees that the OS is very attractive for building his company's products. "Linux gives you excellent processing power and reliability at a cost that helps you keep your product at a competitive price point," he says. "And, since we also host our application for customers who prefer to do things that way, it gives us the scalability we need to ramp up to meet growing market demand."
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