By Scott Courtney,
LinuxToday
IBM President Samuel Palmisano’s keynote address at LinuxWorld
Expo last week may have contained no surprises, but that’s good
news for Linux advocates as the company extends its commitment to
Open Source systems. Within the keynote itself, the press
conference that followed, and a cluster of product-specific
announcements, the implied message from IBM management is, “We made
the right decision in backing Linux.”
Last year IBM announced a number of Linux products and strategic
initiatives, including a US $1 billion investment in Linux
technology initiatives. Even IBM does not toss around the word
“billion” lightly when discussing new business opportunities, and
the company clearly feels that the investment will be repaid with
interest, and Palmisano talked at length about why IBM is so
confident. Thor Olavsrud’s article on Enterprise LinuxToday is a
nice report on the address, in which Palmisano takes aim at what he
calls the “four myths of Linux.” The pro-Linux statements from IBM
management have become less tentative with time, and today’s
keynote contained a pretty blunt assertion by IBM: “We have made a
choice. We have voted for Open Source industry standards.”
The question then becomes not “what did they say?” but rather
“what do they mean?” IBM is pushing Linux hardware at all platform
tiers, but hardware revenue alone will not make good on that
billion dollar bet. And IBM can hardly be called an Open Source
zealot — in fact, major products like DB2 are unlikely to go Open
Source any time soon. “Voting” for Open Source may not mean the
same to IBM as it means to a nonprofit project team. It’s a
question of ideology versus pragmatism, and IBM has pragmatic
reasons for supporting Open Source in general and Linux in
particular.
To a certain extent — though IBM is not saying this directly —
there is bound to be an anti-Microsoft agenda. IBM pays royalties
to Microsoft for every Windows-based system it ships, but more
important is the fact that IBM lost the initiative in defining PC
platform standards, and Linux could help to bring back that lost
control — or at least take it away from a partner-competitor. IBM
has considerable investment in chip design and foundries, and any
gains by Linux mean opportunity for IBM microprocessors as well as
a dent in the dominance of Wintel architecture. Yet all of these
things together do not explain why IBM is waxing poetic about the
virtues of Linux.
The announcements behind the keynote offer a strong indication
that middleware and services, rather than hardware, drive the
company’s revenue expectations. It has taken a while to flesh out
the strategy that was outlined last summer, but real products are
emerging at a steady pace and there are more to come. DB2 Universal
Database is available for Linux on platforms from handhelds to
massive servers. CICS Transaction Gateway offers developers an API
framework for blending Linux applications with traditional
mainframe systems, and the popular MQSeries service brings
message-oriented middleware (MOM) to Linux. WebSphere, now
integrated with Apache, provides a full-scale web application
server. Additional products, such as Tivoli Storage Manager
(formerly ADSM), Tivoli Management Environment, and Tivoli
SecureWay Policy Director, round out the middleware segment.
Oddly, IBM executives see no immediate need to release a COBOL
compiler for Linux. Customers don’t need it, according to Irving
Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technology and strategy in the
Server Group. He and a colleague remarked that customers are using
Linux to integrate with existing COBOL applications rather than
migrating the applications themselves onto Linux. Applications that
are migrated are being rewritten in C++ or Java rather than being
kept in COBOL. The lack of demand for Linux-based IBM COBOL has not
stopped the company from bringing other languages to Linux:
VisualAge Java has been supported on Linux for months, and an
object-oriented version of the REXX language is now available for
free download.
There is no IBM-branded Linux distribution in sight, and the
software offerings are clearly focused on the high end, where IBM
hopes its customers will look to IBM Global Services for help
designing and integrating large-scale solutions. Though less
visible than packaged products such as servers, IBM Global Services
is a large operation and the company is counting on Linux to grow
this highly-profitable business segment. The process of Linux
adoption raises issues of support and training for IBM’s enterprise
customers, and IBM sees an opportunity in addressing those needs.
The announced spending level is US $300 million over a three-year
period, invested in building up Global Services infrastructure to
meet the needs of Linux clients.
The overriding theme to IBM’s latest Linux efforts, and to the
way in which they are being announced, seems to be “what we said
before, and more so.” For companies that are hesitating at the
threshold of Linux, IBM’s increasing confidence may prove
contagious.