‘No Market For Linux In Desktop Segment Yet’

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Bangalore: Juergen Geck, chief technology officer (CTO), Suse Linux, a Novell company, who is responsible for aligning and communicating the company’s technology strategy, was also instrumental in designing SuSE’s flagship product SuSE Linux Enterprise server. The enterprise server was the first Linux offering in the market. In an interview with eFE, he spoke about the current trends in the Linux market. Excerpts:

Today major companies are looking at open source in a big way. Where is it headed?
One of Linux’s greatest strengths is that it runs on a wide range of hardware, from mainframe computers to laptops and PDAs. Companies like Dell, HP, IBM, Sun and others are looking at Linux in a big way.

More and more enterprises will go for Linux because of three things: better efficiency, reduced cost and scalability. According to IDC, Linux is projected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 14 per cent between 2002 and 2007.

Microsoft has been claiming that support to the Linux applications - where only the kernel is free - will actually work out to be more expensive in the long run than Windows?
Linux as an open source is free, and as a bundled distribution it attracts very minimal cost. However, as many commercial distributions of Linux have no per seat or per CPU charges, a company can purchase a single copy and then install it on all its machines, resulting in a substantial cost savings over other operating systems (OS). For all products, support is required. It doesn’t mean that you need to pay more for Linux support. Operating Systems are becoming commoditised. When they become a commodity, other players cannot charge premium. Linux enables co-operation between development works. Overall it will save more costs for enterprises, impacting positively on their bottomline.

Linux is being used among enterprises. What about desktops, Linux has still not made a headway into this market?
Linux is available for desktops. Recently it has overtaken Macs on desktop segment. SuSE is launching a new desktop product for the enterprise segment by this year end. This will increase its presence in enterprise desktops.