http://in.rediff.com/money/2006/apr/08spec.htm
this is old hat (no pun intended!) to this list. nevertheless, text of
article reproduced below:
Linux a BIG hit in India
Leslie D'Monte | BS | April 08, 2006 | 11:31 IST
It has been over a year since UTI Bank set up its call center that
handles over 7,000 calls per day. The bank was looking for a robust
platform that could guarantee it high availability of services and
uninterrupted call traffic. It had options but finally decided on Linux
for its core business applications.
Today, we are really happy with Linux that has delivered 99.99 per cent
uptime so far, says Pritesh Thaker, AVP, IT, UTI Bank. The bank, in
fact, is now planning to base its credit card-based system on Linux too.
UTI is not the lone player to swear by Linux. Eveready, a leading
manufacturer of dry cell batteries and flashlights in India, has built a
mission-critical resource system to automate all functionalities of its
daily business using the Oracle e-business suite running on a Linux
platform. Central Bank of India has implemented Linux in nearly 3000
branches.
The Penguin (official mascot of Linux), it appears, has finally marched
into enterprises like IDBI Bank, Canara Bank, New India Assurance, LIC,
BSNL, IRCTC, ABN Amro, Airtel and even the governments of Maharashtra
and West Bengal. The list, of course, is not exhaustive.
In most cases, though, the implementation of Linux in Indian enterprises
is by Red Hat (primarily since Red Hat Linux has been popularised by the
media and offers support for Linux which, being open source, can be
downloaded for free and has no upfront licensing fee).
Otherwise, one can choose from the hundreds of other Linux distributions
- Mandriva, Debian, Suse, PCLinuxOS, Knoppix and Ubuntu to name a few -
for desktops and enterprises.
All verticals are ready for Linux adoption today. However the banking,
financial and insurance services (BFSI) and government markets have been
pioneers of sorts in adopting Linux. The retail segment is also gaining
ground quickly, along with verticals ranging from telecommunications to
media and entertainment.
In India, we are increasingly seeing corporates running ERPs and
mission-critical applications on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.
Large databases and blade servers are being powered by Linux to run
online share trading and lottery applications, says Javed Tapia, CEO,
Red Hat.
The Indiabulls group is a case in point. Indiabulls runs its Internet
trading platform - Oracle 9i - on Linux. This system, which handles
40-45 per cent of Indiabulls' revenue transactions - nearly 10,000
customers are online at any point of time and transactions are in the
range of Rs 1000 crore (Rs 10 billion) - runs on Linux. The online share
trading infrastructure at Indiabulls generates close to 15 database
queries per minute.
Linux has become prettly stable. We never considered Windows because of
the perception that it has a lot of vulnerabilities. Hence, we adopted
the Linux route and are satisfied with the results, says Tejinderpal
Singh Miglani, CTO, Indiabulls.
IDBI's Sanjay Sharma, Head IT, corroborates this view. IDBI has been
using an Oracle HR management and financial accounting system, which
runs on Linux. From Sharma's perspective, this is a mission-critical
application. We did evaluate options like Unix and Windows too.
However, we did not want to be tied up to resource-hungry applications
and any particular vendor. Besides, you hardly have a problem of viruses
with Linux, he says.
Linux, indeed, is doing reasonably good business. IBM's business built
around Linux, for instance, was worth $16 billion last year and is
projected to be worth more than $50 billion, says the company's global
head of public sector Linux sales, Mary Ann Fisher, who recently spoke
at LinuxWorld, Australia.
She added: Governments worldwide are spending more than $3 billion a
year on Linux hardware, software and services, and this is growing at 35
per cent a year. But it's the US military that is spending the most.
Mission-critical debate
Now, mission-critical applications, among other things, need servers.
And for the first time, the server market in India is expected to cross
the 100,000-unit mark in 2006. Servers are powerful networked machines
for tasks such as handling e-mail, financial transactions, airline
reservations and file storage.
Based on the price, vendors classify servers as small (anywhere from Rs
4 up to Rs 500,000), medium (from Rs 500,000 to Rs 1 crore) and
large (over Rs 1 crore). They are identified as Intel (or X86
processor-based), Unix (or non-X86 processor-based) and Blade servers.
Linux and Solaris are flavours of Unix. Windows and Intel form the
loosely-termed Wintel brand.
Back in 2000, India was primarily a Unix market in the enterprise. With
the entry of certified and supported Linux solutions, Unix users in
India found Linux an
