Linux rising at IBM

Scott Handy started with IBM in 1983 as a systems engineer and did the scenic tour of the company’s sales, marketing, and strategic planning operations. Through the years, he’s covered large accounts, channels, small and midsize business, and IBM solutions for Windows NT, Sun Solaris, and OS/2 Warp.

These days, Handy applies his expertise as vice president for Linux and open source. That makes him a public face (although not the only one) for IBM’s open source strategy.

IDG News Service senior writer Elizabeth Montalbano caught up with Handy at the sidelines of the recent LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit in New York and talked to him about how the industry giant manages to support a vast product portfolio for Linux and open source initiatives.

InfoWorld: Can you tell us how the internal Linux rollout at IBM is going?

We first started talking about it maybe four years ago. What we learned was that it actually was going to be a problem for our support group, our help desk, to have a different set of software on the Linux side than they did on the Windows side. So it was very important to figure out that we needed to standardize on a single programming model for the two environments. Eclipse came out to be the most robust cross-platform environment that we came up with. By rewriting Notes and Sametime, I think we’ve achieved it with the Open Client [desktop management software] — exactly what we needed

So for a while there, we really had to slow down. We were more focused on getting to a common software stack for Windows and Linux than we were on increasing the number of Linux users. And now the big drive within IBM is to get everybody on Open Client. There’s less concern about which OS you’re on, and in fact we’re not going to cap it, we’re going to see what happens with our users. We don’t have a target, but I expect Linux usage will go up. IBM Research seems to prefer Linux, the China Development Lab prefers Linux, [and] we have whole geographies that seem to have at least a slightly greater inclination for Linux than other areas — like Brazil, like India.

IW: IBM has said it would be evenhanded in supporting both Red Hat and Novell equally. What’s the status on supporting other distributions?

SH: Overall our Linux distribution strategy is to support two or more Linux distributions. In the very beginning, in 1999, we had four: TurboLinux and Caldera and Suse and Red Hat. Over time, the customer-buying and the business have consolidated — certainly on the server. Over 90 percent of the servers now ship with Red Hat or Novell Suse. [But] our Linux strategy allows us to support an additional distribution, so if somebody gets a big share — which is basically saying our customers start buying and demanding another Linux distribution — we would do so. And we have done so in certain geographies. We support Asianix in Asia.

IW: What is IBM’s position on the deal between Novell and Microsoft? Do you think it’s a good thing? Do you think Novell has lost some credibility?

SH: Our perspective on the Microsoft-Novell deal is it’s an interesting deal. I think at the end of the day and from everything I’ve seen, the positives slightly outweigh the negatives. There are some interesting aspects of this thing, especially in their partnership around virtualization, that I think could be good for customers. This is a competitive business, and Novell’s doing this to get competitive advantage. Let it play and see where it’s gonna go. Our support for Novell is steadfast and firm, and we continue to drive aggressively in the market with them, but we also partner aggressively with Red Hat, so really not a lot changed in our overall strategy.

IW: Microsoft has called IBM’s commitment to open document standards like Open Document Format into question.

SH: The IBM strategy is behind anything that gets industry traction. ODF has tremendous traction. We have a lot of customers and a lot of governments who are behind [ODF]. We’ve done our part; Lotus Notes and the editors that we ship are ODF-compliant.