“You’ve heard the stories about Linux at major companies,
medium-sized cities and even at NASA. You’ve read about its use in
bizarre clusters that outperform Cray supercomputers. You’ve seen
the manifestation of its computational power in movies like
Jurassic Park and Titanic. You have friends who swear by it, and
maybe some fellow managers who curse at the very mention of its
name. And over the past 12 months, you’ve witnessed Apple, Computer
Associates, Compaq, Corel, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Informix,
Intel, Lotus, NAI, Netscape, Novell, Oracle, SAP and Sybase launch
support for what appears to be the world’s fastest-growing OS. But
there’s still a question with no obvious answer: Is Linux right for
your enterprise?”
“Over the past year we’ve been working to address this issue.
We’ve conducted in-house lab tests, hounded vendors, interviewed
CIOs and kept a hand on the pulse of the Linux community. We’ve
been watching, testing, logging and inquiring about the use of
Linux in corporate environments. Our findings? Not only is Linux
ready for the enterprise, it currently occupies the enterprise–but
not in the manner you might expect. Linux is not powering Oracle
databases yet. It doesn’t drive the financial services, and it
usually doesn’t sit at the heart of all system deployments.”
“Instead Linux currently serves as the Swiss Army knife of
networking. In many ways, it’s a stable version of what NT aspires
to be. Linux has been creeping in from the bottom up–introduced by
engineers to solve esoteric tasks in a hurry. From there, it has
grown to house printing systems, support custom manufacturing
systems, perform traffic graphing and analysis, support custom
intranet applications, and function as a platform for Web and
e-mail gateways.”