Meanwhile, the Indian players are already excited over the pact. With a significant support for open source systems in India, companies could go in for a heterogeneous system, thereby combining both Windows and Linux. With a large chunk of servers in India already on the Windows platform, the pact can give users the freedom to opt for multiple environments, using SuSe Linux.

The open source movement is turning out to be quite a challenge for Microsoft with big names like Google and Amazon already using open source systems. Red Hat too could give Microsoft a formidable challenge in the days to come.

But with this masterstroke, the open source market is divided into two camps: one led from the back by Microsoft, and on the other end are the baiters. And, the preference for interoperable systems could boost Novells sagging fortune and eat into Red Hats share.

Linux in the Government
In a bid to popularize Linux, the Kerala state government has already announced plans to promote free and open source software in education to avoid monopoly. Underlining the importance of the Kerala market for Linux companies, Red Hat has signed an MoU with the state government for supporting Keralas development of open source software.

Tamil Nadu has already dispatched 6,100 Acer desktop systems with SuSe Linux. Chennai is deploying 32,600 Linux desktop systems and training 30,000 government officials for the same along with 43 open source based servers supporting government applications. The Electronics Corporation of India decided in favor of open source software because of its lower cost than proprietary software.

Enterprises Keen Too
With most Indian enterprises adopting Linux like never before, it was the financial sector that was one of the early adopters with major inroads in the areas of insurance and total branch automation.

Reiterating the trend that BFSI has become one of the earliest and most aggressive adopters of Linux, LIC chose to implement Red Hat Enterprise Linux across its desktops and servers, enabling it to completely migrate all critical business applications to Linux across all its locations. Canara Bank also deployed Linux for powering its mission critical banking services on approximately 1,000 servers and 10,000 desktops. The Central Bank of India also moved its entire computing infrastructure to Red Hat, and successfully migrated database and TBA application across the 1,115 branches on Linux. For banking, its entire online share trading operations, India Bulls trusted to go ahead with Linux and the mission critical need was satisfied post the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on low cost servers. By doing this India Bulls managed to procure a cost effective alternative to proprietary technologies and achieved 10 times better performance.

The growing importance of India for Red Hat worldwide is evident from the launch of its Global Services Center in Mumbai. The center will build and implement open source enterprise solutions and services for Red Hats global customers.

Whats in Store
This year Indian enterprises finally realized that open source did not mean only Linux, but included source code of any other software in the open source domain. The Linux market has reached maturity as both IBM and Oracle have been evangelizing Linux for sometime now. And, that Linux has reached a level of robustness, flexibility, manageability, support that is expected of operating platforms. The future is certainly bright for the Penguin in India, as the 11^th five-year plan (2007-12) too has recommended the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), indicating the maturity of open-source software.

Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in

Page(s)   1  2