GartnerGroup: How Broad Will ISV Support for Linux Be?

“ISVs are not a homogeneous community and will approach Linux
support with varying degrees of commitment and enthusiasm.”

“Although new announcements of ISV support for Linux appear
regularly, many are made by emerging vendors that view Linux as the
channel to higher market visibility (e.g., OpenSales’
OpenMerchant). However, even large system software vendors like
Oracle, IBM and CA have promoted strategies around Linux, since
incremental costs relative to large reservoirs of talent (i.e.,
Unix) are minimal, and missed revenue opportunities are viewed as
an even-greater risk. However, mostly absent thus far (with the big
exception of SAP), and preventing Linux from becoming a stronger
challenger to NT, are the preponderance of end-user
packaged-application suppliers (Baan, Lawson Software, PeopleSoft,
SAS Institute and numerous others).”

“Bottom Line: A vacuum currently exists in the
area of much-needed Linux system management tools for backup and
recovery, volume management, file system management, transaction
recovery, high availability, SAN architectures, cluster server
solutions, performance/capacity management and HSM. In the user
application space, ISVs will await more assurance of enterprise
acceptance and study the differences in the open-source process,
licensing issues and intellectual property issues compared to the
proprietary domain before making serious commitments, which on a
broad scale will not happen until 2H01 (0.7 probability).
Enterprises should not plan migrations or new application
architectures requiring deep systems integration on Linux before
ISVs and system vendors show firm support for Linux…”

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