TCO, after all, really depends on individual circumstances. It is easy to go from one vendor to another, with each one producing more or less valid research that seems to show their software offers better TCO than another brand.
"In my view, it’s really up to the customers to make their own evaluations. Although we do have some statistics showing that for some customers Linux can cost up to 80 percent less," Chandiramani says.
General resellers and system integrators could benefit from Red Hat’s subscription model, which meant up to 95 percent of the total solution -- services, hardware, middleware and applications -- was provided by Red Hat. The vendor also provides "hot customer leads" and does training and certification, he adds.
"Australia has been adopting open source for a while now and 2005 is when we’re going to see open source as major competition in projects and government," Chandiramani. "Any reseller or integrator that dismisses this opportunity will lose."
Strong words, but not without support. Government agencies in Australia have definitely got keener on open source-derived options this past year.
Ivan Kladnig, Linux business development manager at IBM Software, agrees. "Things are going fantastically well, I have to admit," he says. He’s hazy about actual numbers, but claims Linux at IBM has seen "tremendous" growth just in the last 12 months. "The market has grown around 40 percent, but I know we are well above that level," Kladnig says.
Customers are definitely migrating to Linux from Windows, as well as from Unix. In the government space, IBM has probably got about 150 implementations, including 12 locally, he says.
Many are deploying J2EE bases on top of a Linux platform, while Rational, Cloudscape and Eclipse applications and non-Linux add-ons such as Samba keep growing in popularity, he says. "And I think we have 50,000 developers on board with Derby. So there’s great interest in a number of areas on the open source front," Kladnig says.
IBM Software by the time this article appears will have announced business partner program changes to further drive open source into Australian IT.
"We recognise that business partners who make this investment need to have a program that offers them exclusive benefits and differentiation. As such, we are making changes," Kladnig says.
IBM partners can look forward to a new enablement and certification framework for Data Management, Lotus, WebSphere, Rational, Tivoli and Linux. Margins and incentives for partners that get certified will also be boosted, as will sales, marketing and technical support, Kladnig says.
Martin Gregory, a platform strategy manager at Microsoft, argues that even the software giant often seen as the bete noire of Linux has several fingers in various open source-related pies. "We have a number of open source products up on SourceForge. Obviously, we do compete with some of the products that fall out of that open source process – OpenOffice, Linux and Samba," he says.
That said, the biggest thing Microsoft saw in the past 18 months was the commercialisation of the Linux space. He asks -- with good reason -- if it really makes sense to talk about open source any more, particularly in relation to commercial distributions such as Red Hat. "And now SuSE is owned by Novell," he says.
Where resellers are concerned, the industry has largely outgrown the entire debate, although there are still Linux distributions such as Debian that use a social charter as their primary motivator. There will always be a place for that kind of open source, and for the "true" open source that exists largely beyond the channel’s reach a kind of creative alternative.
Gregory points out that Red Hat cares about the same stuff Microsoft cares about -- making money. He acknowledges the complaints about security, and the onerous, never-ending task of patching current Microsoft applications. But, he says, would it be better to pretend that patching did not need to occur?
Microsoft is working hard and throwing considerable resources at improving security and finding a way to simplify the patching issue. After all, if it fails to keep customers happy, the game will be lost to those that can do a better job, he says.
It’s also true that Linux distributions have far more vulnerabilities and hack attacks targeting them than is widely recognised, Gregory says, pointing to overseas research by the likes of Mi2G in the UK. "It’s very important that you compare apples with apples," he says.
Gregory can of course quote his own studies, that show VARs and other channel partners can earn as much as 3.5 times more revenue from Windows products than selling Linux products. "And 180 percent more profit growth," he says.
What is clear is that there is no winner. It will be apples for apples, and horses for courses, for a long time yet -- perhaps forever.
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