India important Linux market for Dell

Pragati Simlote

NEW DELHI: Dell is betting big on the Indian market for growth in its Linux business.

Linux has been growing in India at 34 percent and Dell expects this growth to continue.

Dell Asia Pte Ltd Asia Pacific senior solutions and alliances manager Eric D' Angelo said, “The negative growth in Unix and Netware is fueling the Linux growth worldwide, with major growth coming from companies migrating from Unix to Linux. With many data centers migrating to the Linux environment from Unix and Novell stopping new releases of Netware, there is an increased adoption of Linux.”

Talking specifically about India, D'Angelo said that the hot segments like financial and insurance segment would be the growth segments for the company in Linux adoption. More and more companies are now opting for virtualization, which is also going to fuel the Linux growth a in these segments a lot of legacy systems are there which run on Unix. With virtualization, companies can deploy the latest applications and solutions on these systems.

D'Angelo added, “Virtualization helps enterprises decrease the number of servers it has to deploy and virtualization is now being done at the hardware level instead of software. In India, many software development and financial services companies are evaluating virtualization and are now in the process of finalizing the buying decision.”

Currently, 20 percent of all servers shipped by Dell are on Linux. D' Angelo said, “In 2006, we would focus on expansion of Linux server deployments planned by companies. Dell's goal is to speed the commercial acceptance and adoption of Linux and to provide customers with one source for Linux solutions.”

Dell's Linux strategy includes provision of product robustness and enterprise readiness, driving standardization and messaging. Dell is also supporting the Linux community through Dell Linux community website — linux.dell.com and developing a driver/kernel version management utility. Dell is also driving open source software into its hardware suppliers.

The company also has a dedicated Linux development team responsible for OS validation, qualification, certification, etc. The Linux development team in India is responsible for testing, certification and sustaining work of Linux systems.