Gartner sounds alarm over Linux

Businesses would do well to avoid deploying the Linux operating system (OS) at the core of IT systems until 2001, according to analyst GartnerGroup.

Businesses would do well to avoid deploying the Linux operating system (OS) at the core of IT systems until 2001, according to analyst GartnerGroup.

Leading independent software vendors (ISVs) are failing to support the OS as a mainstream business platform, said a Gartner report.

George Weiss, research director of Unix and mid-range strategies at GartnerGroup, said: "Businesses should not plan migrations or new application architectures requiring deep systems integration on Linux before ISVs and system vendors show firm support for the operating system. On a broad scale, this support will probably not happen until 2001."

Despite large systems software vendors such as Oracle, IBM and Computer Associates promoting strategies around Linux, other companies including Baan and PeopleSoft, are "mostly absent thus far" and are "preventing the operating system from becoming a stronger challenger to Windows NT", said Weiss.

But Andy Dickens, European director of sales for Linux vendor Red Hat, disagreed with the report. He said: "The number of strategic software vendors that have ported to Linux is huge.

It represents a not-insignificant part of their investment. The demand is coming from large corporations."

In the user application space, ISVs are waiting for "more assurance of enterprise acceptance", said Weiss. Before making any serious commitments, ISVs are studying the differences in the Open Source process, licensing issues and intellectual property issues compared with the proprietary domain, he said.

Weiss warned users to wait until 2001, because of a current "vacuum in Linux system management tools, volume management, file system management, transaction recovery, high availability, storage area network architectures and cluster server solutions".