IBM, Sage to bring Linux to small businesses

Lucas van Grinsven

LONDON: International Business Machines Corp and Britain's business software

maker Sage Group Plc announced on Tuesday they will offer the Linux operating

system to medium-sized businesses around the globe.

IBM said this would be the first time that open source Linux software has

been offered to run business applications at smaller enterprises on such a large

scale. "It's a watershed event," Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice

president of Technology and Strategy for IBM's Server Group, told Reuters in an

interview.

No financial details were disclosed by either of the two companies, but

Wladawsky-Berger said IBM, which is struggling with stagnating revenues, said it

regards small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) as its "biggest growth

area". Meanwhile, market research group IDC expects the number of Linux

installations to grow by 37 percent this year, outpacing the single digit growth

forecast for the overall IT industry.

Sage said it would start to offer the Linux platform globally in three months

time for its most comprehensive product Line 500, which lets medium-sized

businesses run their finance, distribution, manufacturing and service

operations. "Linux is becoming very important to the business community,

which is why we've taken the decision to support it," said Sage's UK

managing director Graham Wylie in a statement.

Until now Linux has mainly been used by large enterprises for very specific

or heavy-duty computing tasks, such as firewalls and web caching, or for

replacing big racks of Unix servers and mainframes.

Free and stable



Companies that use Linux for these operations take advantage of the fact that
Linux software is free of charge. It is therefore easy to install on new

computers, without having to worry about licensing agreements.

Another advantage of using Linux for fast-growing computing tasks, such as

Web servers, is that it is rooted in the Unix software architecture which is

well suited to add, or remove, computers on demand.

Medium-sized businesses, which often grow rapidly, can take advantage of

these characteristics, said IBM's Julian David, IBM's Northern European vice

president for SMEs. "They can make their choices as they go," he said.

David stressed that Linux, invented by the Finn Linus Torvalds and further

developed by a community of software engineers on the Internet, is extremely

reliable and robust.

IBM expects that Sage resellers will be drawn to this promise of reliability,

which could reduce support costs. Sage customers will be able to choose between

different operating systems, including Microsoft's Windows, as well as Unix and

Linux.