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Enterprise Linux Today: In Context: IBM Integrating Sendmail into Linux Product Offerings

“The bottom line for Linux: IBM has just launched another
major initiative that can be expected to increase Linux adoption in
the enterprise. Bargain pricing on enterprise applications that its
Small Business Server offers will give ISVs and VARs more incentive
to support Linux in the small business market, while this
IBM/Sendmail combination will do the same for Linux in larger
businesses.”

“…IBM has decided to incorporate commercial Sendmail into its
software offerings so that it can offer businesses a messaging
infrastructure that can handle dramatically increasing loads,
plus add the bells and whistles that businesses want to
support collaboration. IBM plans to do this across all its server
lines where Sendmail runs, and across all the operating systems
these servers support — Windows NT and 2000, AIX, Linux, and the
AS/400 OS. So why could this be a big deal for Linux?”

“I posed this question to Michael Nelson, IBM’s director for
Internet technology and strategy. His response reflects the
reasoning behind IBM’s very broad embrace of Linux, across all of
its product lines: while there may be no “one size fits all” for
servers, the scope of IBM’s Linux support means a business with
many different sizes of IBM servers can run Linux with the same
applications on all of them, greatly simplifying their support
issues. Nelson believes “one OS across all servers” will
prove to be a strong selling point for the IBM/Sendmail offering on
Linux.”

“Dave Anderson, Sendmail’s president and CEO, seconded Nelson’s
opinion. He does expect the initial adopters of the IBM/Sendmail
package will be ASPs and ISPs, with corporates mostly using their
“proprietary” OSes. But he expects that “over time Linux will
become the standard” for corporates as well, as they see the
benefit of having one OS running across all their servers.”

“Mark Levitt, an analyst with IDC, also concurs with this view.
He sees the ability for an organization to deploy a new server, of
whatever size, using the same standard set of software, as
representing a significant savings in time and support costs.”

Complete
Story

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