Linux gets a great deal of credit and attention in the desktop and server markets, where it's visible and gaining market share. However, too often, we overlook the power of the Linux platform when it's hidden inside appliances, the so-called embedded market where Linux has long played a dominant role (and where I got my career start in open source at Lineo).
In embedded, Linux dwarfs Microsoft. It's time we took notice.
The most recent Linux-focused IDC market-sizing report came out in spring 2008 at the Linux Foundation's annual summit. The numbers are remarkable:
- Server operating environment CAGR (compound annual growth rate) is estimated at more than 8 percent from 2007 to 2011;
- Total Linux spending on hardware, software, and services has already passed $20 billion annually and is expected to grow to $49 billion by 2011;
- IDC estimates that software spending related to Linux will exceed a CAGR of 35.7 percent from 2006 through 2011 (which still leaves it capturing only 10 percent of of the overall software market);
- Importantly, while Linux started off fulfilling mulish tasks like basic infrastructure deployments, but now Linux supports mission-critical applications like database, ERP, decision support, and general business processing, with business processing deployments jumping from 6.7 percent of new Linux deployments in 2003 to 8.2 percent in 2007.
Even despite these impressive growth trajectories, IDC's numbers miss Linux's highest-volume market: embedded.
Even more than the server market, Linux's growth in appliances stems from a simple fact: Linux is better than the proprietary competition. Beyond cheap, Linux scales, it's fast, it's secure, and it has a small footprint. This isn't just for your Sony TV or TiVo DVR or Linksys home router. Linux also powers enterprise-class appliances that perform some pretty amazing tasks, all thanks to the benefits of Linux.
One recent example the demonstrates the power of embedded Linux is LogLogic, a Sequoia-backed company, which announced on Tuesday that it is launching three new Linux-based appliances to help enterprises with security, database monitoring, and compliance management.
LogLogic was founded in 2002 in the trough of the last technology recession, and it has managed to double revenues on average every year since. Today, it boasts more than 720 customers around the world.
At the heart of that success is Linux. LogLogic decided early with its first products to sell Linux-based appliances to make it as easy as possible for even sophisticated enterprise IT departments to literally plug and play. As an appliance, it didn't have to worry about porting its software solutions to support multiple operating systems. Administrators simply had to enter an IP address and watch the magic begin.
For an application like LogLogic's, Linux is critical. LogLogic's appliances chew through mountains of arcane log data (i.e., machine language), which enterprises are typically required to save for seven years for compliance reasons. To put this in perspective, the average enterprise data center might generate more than a terabyte of log data daily.
LogLogic's Linux-based appliances can mine this huge amount of information for near-instant reports of data breaches or deliver an audit trail on a key document for compliance that allows the audit committee to sign off financial disclosure forms. The company has its own intellectual property tied up in that performance, but it wouldn't be possible without the flexibility and cost advantages of Linux.
We rightly celebrate Linux on the server and optimistically await Linux to arrive fully on the desktop. But Linux in the embedded world has already arrived. LogLogic is one great example of this.
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There hasn't been much Web chatter around Open Kernel Labs, but late last week, the Chicago-based Open Kernel Labs, a spinout from Australia's NICTA, announced a $7.6 million investment from Chrysalis Ventures, Neo Technology Ventures, and Citrix Systems.
This follows a $2.5 million grant Open Kernel Labs recently received from NICTA.
Not much noise is made about Open Kernel Labs because it operates in the embedded-virtualization market, providing microkernel technology to manufacturers of electronics such as mobile handsets.
Importantly, while based on the open-source General Public License 3, the company is able to segregate differently licensed components and run on Linux, Windows, or other embedded operating systems (including real-time operating systems), which is a critical requirement in the embedded world.
True to its open-source roots, developers can dig through information on the source code, another key advantage to an open-source microkernel technology. The embedded market invests a lot of time and resources in customizing code: it's the one market in which modifiability of source code is a must-have feature.
I haven't seen much funding in the embedded-operating-system market since my own company in that market, Lineo, sold to Metrowerks in late 2002. It's nice to see the eruption of the mobile market turning interest toward open-source embedded software again.
Microsoft's Craig Mundie sees a way for the software giant to shift its largesse to the developing world. It's called the phone, and will challenge Microsoft's desktop-centric view of the world in its attempts to grow beyond its Western roots.
Interestingly, Microsoft is actually innovating here. Truly innovating:
Microsoft will increase its focus on making mobile phones part of its strategy to spread IT to people in developing nations, based partly on a prototype already developed for the purpose called Fone+....
The idea is to connect a low-to-mid-end smartphone based on the Windows Mobile OS to a TV via a docking station so data on the handset can be displayed on the TV screen. That way, people can use the computing power in the smartphone on a big screen.
Back in 2003, I looked at buying the intellectual property for Hancom Office's embedded Linux-based competitor to Microsoft Office to kickstart this market. A friend and I couldn't get venture funding for it, but that isn't a problem that plagues Microsoft. Cash is in abundance in Redmond. It has the resources to do this right.
... Read moreLinux has been proclaiming the year of the desktop for years, to no avail. Meanwhile, quietly, insidiously, it has been taking a rising share of the mobile and embedded market. Indeed, ABI Research pegs Linux's share of the mobile market at 20 percent by 2013. Such growth, in part driven by Google's Android stamp of approval and Nokia's Maemo approval, puts a serious crimp on Symbian's and Microsoft's ambitions in mobile.
As ABI research notes,
Linux solutions will be at the center of the drive to bring more content-rich environments to users who currently utilize mid-tier devices. More importantly, it looks increasingly likely that mobile Linux solutions will be an important building block in enabling an application domain that embraces Web-based applications and blended Web/native applications.
Mobile Linux's rise is partly a function of its superior cost proposition, but as ABI implies, it's also partly due to its flexibility and the iPhone's introduction of web-based applications. As on the desktop, the more we move applications to the web, the less necessary it is that we have Windows waiting on the client to receive them.
... Read moreMicrosoft has 32 percent of the embedded software market, but apparently fears Linux's 8 percent (and rising) share.
...[L]ast October, VDC released the results of a survey in which embedded developers overwhelmingly said that they planned to use either free or licensed versions of Linux on their next projects instead of proprietary operating systems. "Linux remains an attractive operating system choice for a range of embedded development teams for a number of reasons, including: royalty-free runtime costs, advanced networking capabilities and technical features, [and] the large base of engineers familiar with the Linux operating system," the research firm said.
In response, Microsoft is reshaping and expanding its line of embedded Windows products.
Good luck. The embedded market is perfectly suited to open source, and not to a license-driven model like Microsoft's. Here's why.
... Read more
Lineo (later renamed Embedix) was an embedded Linux vendor that rose to prominence in 1999 to 2000, and then cratered into obsolescence in 2002. I joined in 2000, the day that the acquisition of six (yes, six) different companies was announced. My first day of work was the approximately 400-person company get-together designed to build a team out of a mass of new bodies. Up until that day the total employee base was approximately 40 people.
I learned a tremendous amount about business and open source and the intersection of the two during my two years with Lineo. These lessons heavily influence how I see open-source opportunities today.
In the interest of sharing, here's what I learned:
... Read moreEmbedded Systems Design's annual survey of developers has turned up some interesting data: the embedded Linux gold rush may finally be over. My first job in open source was for embedded Linux pioneer Lineo, so I found this news both interesting and surprising: Linux for embedded (mobile phones, SOHO routers, etc.) is about as certain as my daughter asking for a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch.
In other words, guaranteed.
In looking at the data, that may still be the case, though possibly we've turned the corner on embedded Linux's hype cycle, too, as Richard Nass in an article for ESD suggests.
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