Charting a Course to Linux Joe Panettieri Editorial Director, Custom Conference Group Ziff Davis Media

Transcription

1 Charting a Course to Linux Joe Panettieri Editorial Director, Custom Conference Group Ziff Davis Media Hello, and welcome to Charting a Course to Linux. My name is Joe Panettieri. I m the Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Media Custom Conference Group. The Ziff Davis Enterprise Group consists of three key publications as well as our Custom Conference Group. Now these three publications zero in on Linux and the enterprise very aggressively, because it is a mission-critical platform. It s no longer a platform where people are kicking the tires. We re seeing missioncritical financial applications, CRM applications, ERP applications, databases, and additional types of applications being deployed on Linux on an enterprise scale. So I invite you to reach out to our publications for more on case studies and real-world examples of where Linux is taking hold. In terms of my presentation, I d like to zero in on some key points: CIO priorities, deployment trends, key Linux when it comes to financial services. We ll have some sample eager adopters. Who is actually using Linux? I think you ll be surprised by the number of companies that have deployed Linux successfully within their enterprises. We ll also get the partner perspective. What is it that brings together Red Hat, IBM and Intel for an event like this? What are the partner synergies? What are the key go-to market offerings where these key partners can help you in terms of charting a course to Linux and unlocking real business value, from not only your existing applications, but perhaps some new applications. My first point: CIO software priorities. This information is based on research from CIO Insight magazine; roughly 50,000 readers turn to CIO Insight. There are five key areas where CIOs invest in most heavily when it comes to software, and not by coincidence, a lot of these

2 investments are occurring on the Linux platform. These include disaster recovery. Data integrity. Business intelligence. Business process management, and portals. When we did this research, it involved more than 200 CIOs. Based on information they gave back to us, they are actually increasing their spending on these five key areas by 12% or more this year. The vast majority of those deployments are happening in a Linux environment, particularly on Wall Street, particularly with financial services firms. So what are the CIOs telling us in terms of their integration priorities? They need to integrate their applications. They re suffering from data silos, information silos, where one application doesn t speak with another application. They need to unlock the full value of their financial systems. We cannot afford to rip and replace our existing architectures. What we need is a smooth migration path that leverages the best of what we have, and also provides new value, new applications, and new information at your fingertips on the trading floors. We need to deliver one version of the truth. What do we mean by that? Again with those application silos you re never quite sure which piece of information is correct. With one version of the truth, on a Linux platform, you are able to cull information from all of your legacy systems, combine it, sift through it, and see exactly how your business is performing at any given moment. And finally, we need to simplify platforms. I will walk you through some key statistics in a few minutes in terms of how diverse our network infrastructures have been over the years, and how, thanks to Linux, we are simplifying our platforms. A lot of people, when they talk about Linux, when they explore Linux, they think this is a software environment, a system software services environment, that is maybe three or four years old. On the contrary, Linux has been evolving, developing, maturing to enterprise levels for more than a decade. We started out in 1991 with Linus Torvald s thinking about developing a UNIX for the rest of us. Something that has UNIX s reliability, UNIX s scalability, but far lower cost, and far lower interoperability across multiple vendors when it comes to software developers and hardware providers. Linus also wanted to make it portable. You can go from a laptop all the way 2

3 to a high-end enterprise system. And in more recent years, we ve seen Linux shrink down to portable systems, handheld systems, embedded systems. You need it to be industry standard as well. It could not be fragmented. It was critical, so that if an ISV wrote an application, it could run across Linux regardless of your environment. So in , we sold a lot of industry confusion, multiple operating systems from multiple vendors. By 1994 we started to get some clarity. Linux version 1.0 is released and Red Hat was launched. So let s look at It was an incredibly fragmented market with some operating systems that simply were not designed for enterprise application deployments. Netware was robust as a file and print server; however, it was not designed with enterprise applications in mind. Organizations needed an alternative; they needed something that offered the power of UNIX but at PC price points and at PC interoperability levels. By 1996 we started to see some of that come together. Version 2.0 of Linux was released. And suddenly, we were gaining a critical mass, what I call a tipping point for Linux. We saw Intel invest in Red Hat in We saw Red Hat launch a very successful IPO in 1999, one of the most successful IPOs of the last decade. By 2000, IBM s CEO stepped forward and pledged to invest $1 billion in Linux development and support. Suddenly the number one knock against Linux who s going to support it? was over. The debate had ended. Enterprise companies were stepping forward to support Linux and the enterprise in a real way. Today we see that Linux enjoys critical mass. What do I mean by critical mass? In 2004, Linux enjoyed roughly 30% of the server market. That number will grow to reach roughly 40% of the server market by 2008, according to IDC. This growth is not a coincidence. It s not merely a minor trend. It s a critical trend in that we re seeing rapid standardization on database platforms, webservers, architectures, financial trading systems, and other types of applications that have discovered the power and the payoff of Linux. So why Linux? I ve touched on some of these points but I think it s critical to reinforce them. It s open and it s scalable. There is a critical mass, integrators, consultants, service and support professionals who are stepping forward to support enterprises, large enterprises, midsize 3

4 enterprises, and increasingly small businesses when it comes to running Linux in an organization. That broad support extends to software developers where now many of the applications that we took for granted in the UNIX world and the Windows world have now been imported to Linux or moved very rapidly and very easily to Linux because it s easy to design for Linux. We also see a critical mass of hardware support, from the microprocessor level all the way up to server architectures. Is Linux truly mission-critical? Who s running Linux, and why? In a recent survey by Fenextra Research, roughly 100 services professionals were asked, Are you running Linux servers in your Wall Street firm? That number has grown very rapidly: 58% are now saying yes, compared to less than 27% last year. It s not just about running Linux. Sure, you can run a web server on Linux, you can run an server on Linux, perhaps some groupware applications that are departmental, but are you running mission-critical applications on Linux? Would you trust your financial trading systems to Linux? The overwhelming answer is yes, according to a poll by IDC. More than 53% of financial services firms already are running Linux as their mission-critical platform for financial trading systems and other types of enterprise applications, including CRM and ERP. Why are organizations so bullish on Linux? Where are we seeing it deployed in addition to some of the applications I ve mentioned? I m going to give you three key examples. We re seeing it used at the infrastructure level, for network infrastructure, mail servers, file and print servers. We re seeing it for high volume applications. The types of servers that if they go down for even a minute, millions of dollars is lost. These systems cannot go down, so thanks to architecture such as grid computing and service oriented architectures, we re seeing Linux take hold on these high volume systems, including, by the way, the ATMs you use every day and take for granted. And you know when you put your card in, the money s going to come out, and there s not going to be a system crash the moment I try to do that transaction. We re also seeing it used increasingly for analytical applications, risk management, portfolio management. The idea 4

5 is to analyze key data so you can find your most profitable customers and better serve them, and we re seeing that happen on Linux today. So who are some of the adopters? It s not even fair to call them early adopters anymore because there is a critical mass of Linux users on Wall Street, but two I d like to mention are Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers. Morgan Stanley, as many of you know, is a top 10 global financial services firm, and their objective was to increase the performance and reliability of their overall enterprise architecture. Prior to kicking the tires on Linux and exploring the Linux environment, they found that their UNIX servers were running at about 98% capacity. That s critical; that s redline. That means that at any given moment, if they went over 100% capacity, something was down, a system could not be accessed; they need to make a change. What they did is embrace Red Hat Enterprise Linux on more than 400 servers, and these were not again file and print systems; these truly are mission-critical applications, and the end result was startling. A 13-fold increase in price performance documented by Morgan Stanley. That s true ROI in any business. Another prime example is Lehman Brothers. Lehman, like many New York firms, was impacted dramatically by the 9/11 terror attacks. When the attacks occurred, they lost roughly 1,000 servers and needed to replace them rapidly. They turned to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and our other partners today, IBM and Intel, and the end result again was startling. Roughly twice the performance of the Legacy UNIX systems. That s quite a payoff. Let me repeat that: twice the performance of the Legacy UNIX systems, and that occurred at a much lower price point. In fact, a quarter of the price of traditional UNIX systems. For more information on that, you can turn to Waters magazine online for their November 2002 edition; they ve actually documented this case study. So now the partner perspective. It s not a coincidence that our three partners have come together today. We have Red Hat, Intel, and IBM, three of the key leaders of the Linux movement. A lot of people, when they think of Linux, think of a very fragmented market, lots of different distributions. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth in terms of market realities. The 5

6 reality is, Red Hat enjoys 85% market share and the U.S. Linux market. That means nearly nine out of 10 Linux installations are actually Red Hat installations. The company is overwhelmingly profitable and is growing very rapidly. Last year the year-over-year revenue grew 58%; that s nearly 60% revenue growth. And mind you, we re not talking about a small company any more. This is very rapid growth for a midsize software organization. Even though Linux is portable across multiple processors, be it proprietary risk or Intel-based, 98.8% of customers are choosing to deploy Linux on Intel-based architectures, industry standard architectures. So there is market choice out there, but the market has spoken, and they re choosing Intel for Linux. IBM is the number one provider of Linux-based systems worldwide-- more than 12,000 corporate customers have entrusted their systems to Linux while working with IBM. And also if you look internally at IBM, you ll see that it practices what it preaches. IBM s website, major chip manufacturing facilities, and corporate applications all run on Linux within IBM s organization. In fact, more than 300,000 IBM employees depend on Linux every day to get their work done. IBM trusts Linux, and therefore IBM s customers trust Linux. So how do you get more information? You can turn to Red Hat, Intel, or IBM, but you can also use me. Feel free to contact me via or our website. I d be happy to take your questions, and I invite you to ask our partners today for their expertise; reach out to Red Hat, IBM, and Intel. Thank you again, and enjoy the rest of the presentations. 6