The San Diego, California-based company’s Linspire Professional offering is currently being tested at a number of enterprise organizations, including the State of Indiana’s Access program, and will pose a challenge to the desktop credentials of Red Hat, and Novell, Mr Carmony told Computer Business Review.
Linspire Professional will not be a new version of the company’s eponymous Linux distribution, but will instead take advantage of enhancements with its CNR software delivery subscription technology to enable administrators to control a company’s desktops from a remote location.
CNR currently enables consumers to locate and download open source and proprietary desktop Linux applications, as well as Linspire OS security updates, but the Professional version will enable administrators to lock systems down and manage them from a remote location.
I think this is really going to give Red Hat and Novell a wake-up call that we can do desktop management, said Mr Carmony. He admitted that the expertise of Linspire’s rivals on the Linux server side had previously given them an edge in this space, but maintained that the company has now caught up.
When we first launched CNR we had a 50% success rate – it was a crapshoot, he said. Now we have a 98%-plus success rate. We really have figured it out. With CNR we have the best technology, we just haven’t deployed it on the back office side.
Mr Carmony added that the company was not looking to compete with Red Hat and Novell on the server, but maintained that the company’s experience with desktop Linux in the consumer space was being bolstered by deployments such as Indiana’s Access project, that will see more than 300,000 high school students being given access to Linux desktop machines.
Novell’s Linux Desktop is also involved in the Access project, but Mr Carmony maintained that Linspire has been chosen by 90% of the schools so far due to its ease of use, which he maintained was an example of the advantage Linspire had gained over Red Hat and Novell by focusing on consumers.
For three years they [Indiana] have been trying to do this, but none of the other Linuxes they used had the ease of use down, he said. We’ve always believed consumers would lead desktop adoption, he added. We’re deploying and perfecting now because we went to consumers.
The company is also working with a number of enterprise-scale beta sites on Professional – one of them dwarves the State of Indiana, according to Mr Carmony – and the product, customers, and new partnerships for the enterprise will be announced over the next three months.
It remains to be seen whether Linspire can do more to encourage the enterprise adoption of Linux on the desktop than Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva, Xandros, et al already have, but Mr Carmony is convinced that a tipping point is in view – believing it to be 12 to 18 months for consumer adoption, and two-to-three years for the enterprise.
What’s going to drive it is the early adopters are now deploying it, he said, noting that today a business deploying Linux on the server generates few headlines because it has become accepted practice.
On the desktop, it’s still scary, he added, noting that an IT director suggesting a move to desktop Linux runs the risk of putting their job on the line if the move fails. Once a handful of big companies have stuck their neck out we’ll have fixed problems with the likes of Indiana we won’t have to fix again.
Mr Carmony added that the company saw three factors needing to come together for desktop Linux to reach that tipping point: technology, the channel, and end-user demand. He admitted that demand was the all-important factor that concerned him the most, however.
The one I worry about is the end-user demand. The reason that one concerns me the most is because it’s the most expensive. It takes time for consumers to learn about it. But when it happens, I think it will happen quickly.
All of which begs the question as to what constitutes a tipping point. As far as Mr Carmony is concerned it relates to the importance that ISVs place on a particular platform. Citing Apple Computer’s OS X as an example, he said: If desktop Linux can get to 3% of the market, you have critical mass.
