LinuxWorld report: Day 2

 
 

LIVE FROM LINUXWORLD EXPO -- Day 2: Tuesday August 13, 2002
Special to Linux Weekly News
by Russell Pavlicek

Well, the long awaited start day finally arrived!  This day saw some very 
long lines at the registration desk upstairs.  Patient attendees waited 
for some time to make their way through the queue for badges.  I didn't 
hear any complaints, though.

The show floor finally opened and was instantly mobbed by attendees.  
Notable on the floor is the HP booth -- or, rather, the HP booths.  It 
appears that HP and Compaq were both Platinum Sponsors of the event 
originally.  When the merger went through, the new HP found itself with 
two gigantic booths next to each other in the center of the show floor.  
They aren't wasting the space, though.  They have a lot to show at what 
must be the largest booth in LinuxWorld history.

As in the winter show in New York, many of the distribution companies have 
decided to have small or no booths.  Instead, you can find signs of 
particular distributions at selected partner booths.  Notably, I've seen 
Red Hat partner signs in a few places.

The best boothware I've seen thus far is on the folks from Shaolin
Microsystems.  Their colorful, long, flowing robes are a stark departure
from usual polo shirts worn by most other booth people.  The Linux Journal
booth has adopted a tropical island look, which may betray where the good
folks at LJ wish they were right now.  Heck, I'd take an island paradise
over booth duty any day.

In the swag department, there are the giveaways to be found on the show 
floor.  Personally, I picked up a Red Hat hat, a light-up bouncing ball 
from Cybozu, and a corkscrew from CodeWeavers (which is a clever
joke from a company that supports Wine).

But booth attire and trinkets aside, this show is definitely about 
business.  Attendees are on the show floor to research and buy solutions.  
And, from the looks of it, they are finding a number of good solutions to 
choose from.

For instance, the folks at Cybozu are selling Share360, a very nice
web-based office collaboration product for small-to-medium sized
businesses.  It combines webmail, scheduler, simple project manager,
address book, memos, discussion groups, web forms, bulletin boards, and
more into one simple interface.  Frankly, this could be just the ticket
for smaller businesses looking to replace or avoid the Microsoft Exchange
trap.  Particularly, a robust scheduler is a feature that few Linux-based
server products provide, but many customers want.  Cybozu seems to have
what the doctor ordered here, with the ability to schedule individuals or 
groups with the click of a button.  The simple project manager could also 
be useful for teams which don't want all the complexity of traditional 
project managers.  And the webform capability is impressive for small 
companies.  With a few clicks, you can design corporate forms, 
determine the approval routing, and track the progress of any submission 
in the approval system.  Quite nice.

On the other side of the coin, the folks at BMC Software have products
that meet the needs of very large corporations.  They feature products
that rollout and manage Linux systems deployed on the IBM Z-series
mainframes, as well as x86 servers.  An established company with a large
portfolio of products, BMC found that there was a growing need to address
the Linux market within their marketplace of large businesses.  They found 
that porting their products to Linux was simple.  They quickly 
discovered that large companies will happily pay for Linux solutions, just 
like they pay for non-Linux solutions.  As long as the customer 
is receiving excellent value for a fair price, they will do business.  
Large businesses don't expect the software solution to necessarily cost 
less because it is on Linux; they just want a winning value proposition.  
And it looks like BMC is trying to deliver that with gusto.

I also caught up with the folks at Ximian who clued me in on a number of 
things.  Where Ximian started off by addressing the needs of the technical 
desktop user, the company is now focusing on providing corporations with 
the full functionality that businesses require.  With the excellent 
backbone of GNOME and Evolution, they are now looking at working other 
mature components (like OpenOffice and Mozilla) into a neat solution that 
businesses can deploy painlessly in the enterprise.  The goal is not to 
replace every Windows PC at a business, but to allow the Windows PCs and 
Ximian-based desktops to easily coexist in a business setting, with 
seemless sharing of documents and files between the two environments.  
While most of the technology exists to do this, there are still points 
that need to be smoothed out so that business users can be totally 
comfortable with this solution.

In the Press Room, their were several interesting announcements.  In 
particular, Jon "maddog" Hall presented the speakers who will be giving 
the free "Linux Around the World" talks on the expo floor on Wednesday.  
There was also a delegation from the People's Republic of China, which 
announced that they have released software to improve the Chinese desktop 
for Linux.  In addition, they said that Open Source was growing in PRC and 
that Chinese developers are being encouraged to continue the improvement 
of Open Source software.

There was also a lively panel discussing Linux in the Enterprise.  
Representatives from companies like Ximian, Borland, Red Hat, and others
discussed what improvements are needed to increase penetration of Linux
in large corporations.  Not surprisingly, each corporation looked at the
problem from its own perspective, which displayed that this is a
multifaceted task.  However, there was nothing to indicate that any
particular issue was out of reach from the community.

Well, I have to get some rest so I can get back to the show tomorrow.  
I hope to have more news tomorrow, so stay tuned.