| Gartner analysts acknowledge Linux impact on enterprise |
Oct. 19, 2004
eWeek's open source columnist Stephen Vaughn-Nichols says that Gartner analysts are delivering a new message about Linux in the enterprise at their annual Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando. In past years the show's focus was decidedly anti-open source says Vaughn-Nichols, but this year the enterprise Linux session featured Gartner vice president George Weiss predicting Linux will equal any other operating system still in business by 2010. No longer is open source taboo at Gartner, according to the report in which analyst Mark Driver advises companies that they would "be stupid not to use open source as part of your application management strategy."
Research firms have frequently come under fire from the Linux community for being biased toward proprietary vendors in their recommendations. Some critics have questioned analyst methodology, including the inability to accurately account for the number of deployments of an operating system that is freely available, or at least freely copied within an enterprise. Some pundits have discredited studies citing the funding source alone.
In the enterprise, the question of total cost of ownership (TCO) has been the focus of many debates. Last year Gartner released a "special report" that concluded that desktop Linux migration only makes sense in a limited range of situations. That study named labor, administration costs, and lost productivity due to Linux learning curves as key factors in driving up the costs.
US-based research firm Yankee Group came under fire after it claimed that it would be prohibitively expensive and complex for businesses to move from Windows to Linux and "would not provide any tangible business gains for the organisation."
Many advocates and case studies emerged worldwide in an effort to refute these challenges. Governments, too, launched projects to examine the real costs of migration. Australia's welfare agency, Centrelink, set up a lab to research the cost benefits of open source Linux for the government.
In July, an Albany-based cardiology practice revealed that it had saved costs of over 37 percent in just eight months by moving to Linux thin clients.
Last year, a Microsoft-funded report claiming that embedded system development using Microsoft's Windows Embedded embedded operating systems typically costs just 25 percent of the costs of using embedded Linux touched off a maelstrom.
Read the eWeek column
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