Despite all the hype associated with a never-ending Linux versus Windows battle, it's Unix, and specifically Sun Solaris that has felt the most pressure in the server operating system landscape.
While I doubt that Solaris will completely languish long-term under Oracle's watchful eye (in fact, it may well flourish), there is little question that Sun's ups and downs in the recent past have made customers look to alternatives.
At a recent IBM analyst meeting, Inna Kuznetsova, director, Linux strategy, told attendees that the Linux business is strong and growing.
- In the past three years, over 1,800 customers have migrated from competitive platforms to IBM, and nearly 50 percent of those IBM wins included Linux.
- IBM doubled their number of Sun customer wins between first quarter and second quarter 2009.
Much of the growth comes from IBM's close relationship with Red Hat, which allows IBM to play all sides of the fence in terms of OS suggestions to their customers.
This comes at a time when Novell has decided to invest further into OpenSUSE, adding full-time staff to the project team. As The Register noted, it's a bit shocking that it's taken this long for Novell to properly fund the effort, but it seems like an obvious time to take advantage of the market opportunity as Solaris and OpenSolaris are potentially on the ropes.
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InfoWorld's Paul Krill interviewed Ian Murdock at JavaOne and got some good tidbits including Murdocks' thoughts on making money with open source and the licensing issues associated with CDDL and GPL.
I think the big question around open source is how do you make money from it? And it's because the software industry has traditionally been built on an intellectual property licensing model. But the reality of the situation is with the rise of open-source software, developers don't buy things anymore. [It is] a world where you can go to the Web and download just about anything you could possibly need to put an application into production. So you don't monetize at the point of acquisition of software any longer, you have to monetize at a different place.Definitely worth a read.
With JavaOne starting tomorrow I have been waiting to see what kind of interesting things Sun will be launching. If OpenSolaris + EC2 is the best they've got it may be a long week.
Some interesting vendors are running their software on the OS-EC2 platform. For example, GigaSpaces provides software for highly distributed, highly available environments and running it as a Cloud application is cool when you consider that most enterprises are not that keen on the fact that servers in the cloud are just part of the distributed network.
It also makes sense to run Zmanda in the Cloud, as there is really no reason why you shouldn't back up your databases online and offsite.
I guess the big question is if it matters that it's OpenSolaris underlying what is effectively semi-sophisticated web hosting?
My take is that it matters in the sense of Sun now has table stakes for Clound infrastructure, but that the operating system is not the important part. What matters is the ability to run a wide variety of applications with no necessary knowledge of what's underlying the apps or where they are physically located. Sun is definitely going in the right direction but this isn't earth-shattering just yet.
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