By Jacqueline Emigh
Linux Today Correspondent
“We’re really bullish about Linux,” contended Dave Dargo, VP of
Oracle’s Linux Program Office, during a keynote speech at
LinuxWorld today. Over the next decade, he predicted, Oracle will
achieve as much success on Linux as it showed on RISC/Linux during
the 1990s. Linux will now form the basis for Oracle’s grid
computing architecture.
Oracle first started offering its product on the Linux platform
back in 1998, Dargo noted. At that point, though, Linux represented
just one of a number of different OS supported by Oracle.
About two-and-a-half years ago, Oracle had a positive change of
heart about Linux. The main reason? The responsiveness of Red Hat
and SuSE Linux whenever Oracle commented out a development fix.
Then Oracle implemented a no charge, code level support program
for Linux. Dargo described the tech support as a “tremendous
catalyst” for Oracle on Linux.
Actually, success will come sooner for Linux than it did for
Unix, he predicted. During the 1990s, mainframe database developers
faced the need to build new skill sets in order to use Linux.
The Linux platform won’t face the same problem, he pointed out.
Instead, it’s Microsoft developers who are now in the same shoes as
the mainframe prograammers of the past. “Skill self-dispossession
is very expensive,” Dargo observed.
Others current conditions that will contribute to the success of
Linux include an increasingly enterprise-strength architecture,
customer wins, and growing hardware commoditization, for lower
operational costs, Dargo said.
To support its grid initiative, Oracle will place a new emphasis
on configuration management over the year ahead, the Oracle VP told
the LinuxWorld crowd.