“During its annual symposium on IT trends last October, the
Gartner Group identified as two important post-Y2K issues for IT
directors: knowledge management and the emergence of the Linux
operating system. Almost a year later, the two trends are about to
intersect. Red Hat Inc. of Durham, N.C., the leading vendor of
Linux products and services, plans to make two KM applications
available on its version of the open-source operating system. The
products come from established KM vendors SAS Institute of Cary,
N.C., and Hummingbird Ltd. of Ontario, Canada.”
“SAS will release a Linux version of its SAS System 8 platform
later this year. Among the SAS applications that will be available
for use on Linux are IT ServiceVision (for capacity planning and
performance monitoring), CFO Vision (for financial reporting and
analysis) and CRM Solution (for creating data warehouses and
performing data mining). Hummingbird will include its Enterprise
Information Portal (EIP) core engine with a Linux distribution from
Red Hat and SuSe Inc. Several other KM vendors also intend to port
their applications to Linux by the end of the year.”
“Despite evangelism by its proponents, Linux so far has
attracted only a handful of applications. “Linux is crawling into
the knowledge management space in blips,” says Matthew Doering,
senior vice president of technology for QueryObject Systems of
Roslyn Heights, N.Y., a vendor of software for Internet-enabling
desktop business intelligence applications. “Knowledge
management is facilitated by the Web infrastructure, which is a
strength of Linux.”