InsiteOne placed a heavy bet on open-source platforms because it believed they would provide reliability and scalability — and they have, says David Cook, chairman and founder of the company. Another advantage is that Linux has become a positive selling point with clients. Cook recently met with a large government agency that is a prospective customer and is moving its entire IT infrastructure to Linux. "Because we're on Linux, we got a check mark on that question on the application," he says.

To be sure, there are still uncertainties when it comes to adopting open-source products in the enterprise. In addition to the trepidation that accompanies any technological change, a specific caveat to would-be users of Linux is the legal question that still dangles over the code. The lawsuits filed by SCO Group against a group of companies concerning portions of Linux that SCO claims infringe on part of its Unix operating system are still in progress. In August Open Source Risk Management Inc., a firm that provides insurance coverage against lawsuits involving patents and copyrights, published a report saying that 283 registered software patents could possibly figure into such lawsuits.

Concern about lawsuits "shows up in our surveys. But for the most part, it's not stopping people from starting pilot projects and seeing how Linux would fit in their environment," says IDC's Kusnetzky. At this point, nothing seems to be stopping the move to open source and its greater role in the enterprise.

"I think it's already on everyone's road map in some sort of way," says Gartner analyst Michael McLaughlin. "Companies have to be aware of the benefits. We've reached the point where deployment of [open source] for enterprise computing is very appropriate."

Bob Violino is a freelance writer based in Massapequa Park, New York.

Setting the Standard

In September the Free Standards Group announced the availability of Linux Standard Base 2.0. The San Francisco-based nonprofit organization, which develops and promotes open-source software standards, says the standard is an essential component for the long-term market success of Linux. New features in the release include an application binary interface for C and support for 32- and 64-bit hardware architectures. The standard has the support of some of the biggest players in the Linux marketplace, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Dell, Novell, and Red Hat. The group says the broad support is significant because it will help keep Linux from diverging, as Unix systems did in the past. The standard is available now from the group's Website, at www.freestandards.org.

Dan Kusnetzky, vice president, system software, at IDC, says the effort shows that open-source software is gaining greater momentum in the business world. "The emergence of standards is an indication that something has become mainstream. Otherwise, why would anyone care?" he says. "The fact that the group has come up with this and has [leading] vendors signed up to support it is another major milestone toward Linux as an enterprise platform."

Opening a New Frontier

The next triumph for open source may well be the corporate database. More than half a dozen options already exist, led by MySQL and PostgreSQL. Falling under the rubric of open-source databases, or OSDBs, these products are already finding their way into corporate use, sometimes for mission-critical applications. A recent report by AMR Research found that, while advanced functionality and scalability are still open questions, the performance and stability of leading OSDBs are deemed acceptable by many. The availability of commercial support contracts gives companies the confidence they need to embrace this new breed of database, and most current users of OSDBs expect them to equal commercial products in all key criteria within three years.

That doesn't mean that the world will abandon the IBM, Oracle, and other commercial databases that currently provide a major portion of IT bedrock. As AMR notes, corporate inertia is a force to be reckoned with, even when new options cost less. More to the point, companies with terabytes of data won't be happy to learn that the maximum capacity of OSDBs can be measured in gigabytes, moving business logic ("stored procedures") to OSDBs is cumbersome, and decision-support and business-intelligence systems that rely on elaborate queries are not currently a good fit with OSDBs.

None of these problems is insurmountable, and, like Linux, OSDBs are constantly being refined to meet more-complex corporate needs. But for now, OSDBs tend to be harnessed to serve new systems rather than retrofitted to underpin existing applications. AMR notes that, on a per-CPU basis, the most expensive OSDB costs less than 4 percent of the most expensive traditional database ($1,500 versus $40,000), which certainly helps the ROI calculation. And OSDBs are seen as being simpler to administer. Software companies whose products rely on databases are interested in the growing success of OSDBs — money that customers don't have to spend on the underlying technology should help drive sales of the applications that ride on top. But the catch is that many companies won't aggressively pursue OSDBs until they see a suitable supply of compatible software. OSDBs remain a leading-edge technology, but AMR expects them to be mainstream within three years.

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