Published in AustralianIT, July 30 2003

LINUX is slowly gaining momentum in the enterprise, but its progress in Australia is lagging relative to other Asia-Pacific countries.

Officials from IBM, which has been one of the strongest supporters of the corporate Linux movement, admit that the open source OS hasn't proved as much of a hit with Australian businesses as it has elsewhere in the region.

"Linux is very well accepted in China, India and Korea, and actually is quite strong in Japan. And Korea always goes into the most advanced technology before anyone else," Denis Yip, director of the Asia-Pacific eServer iSeries unit, said at the company's iSeries Strategic Planning Conference in Queensland. "These are the countries in the Asia-Pacific region where we see more Linux momentum."

Despite its conspicuous absence from that list, Australia has been one of the bright spots for Big Blue's iSeries business. Local sales growth in the last quarter was 59 per cent, Mr Yip said. However, the driver was a surge in ERP applications and a successful partnership with EDS rather than a sudden dose of penguin power.

Even in countries where Linux is popular, it hasn't yet shifted from its well-recognised role as an ancillary server. "We have a lot of customers using Linux, but not in their core applications yet," Mr Yip said.

IBM is hedging its own technology bets in some areas. While its iSeries servers already run Linux, OS/400 and Windows, servers which also run AIX (IBM's Unix variant) are due early next year.

Worldwide iSeries director and former Lotus chief Al Zollar said despite the common core of the products, AIX was unlikely to be subsumed by Linux in the near future. "We see a role for AIX for a long time to come," he said.

Another issue facing Linux users is SCO's controversial claims that it owns the rights to key technologies used in Linux.

IBM officials declined to comment on current legal action against IBM and other Unix developers by SCO, although Mr Zollar said in his keynote address that the lawsuit was "silly".

Angus Kidman travelled to the Strategic Planning Conference as a guest of IBM.