Those were the crux of IBM’s messages delivered at LinuxWorld, which emphasized future open source business strategy rather than specific Linux-based product announcements.
We’re thoroughly convinced that open source beyond Linux will be more of a disruptive force in the next three years, than Linux was in the past 15, said Scott Handy, vice president of Linux and Open Source at IBM.
IBM pointed to small-midsize business (SMB) and the BRIC (Brazil/Russia/India/China) markets as the places where the bulk of the growth will occur.
To sell those products, IBM will depart from the way it rolled out Linux to its product units. Instead of using what it termed an overlay organization that proselytized and seeded the business units, the software units themselves will be responsible for incubating and selling open source offerings.
The opportunity is now big enough that we want to move faster and more aggressively than we did with Linux, said Handy.
Consequently, the open source WebSphere Application Server (WAS) Community Edition won’t be sold by a separate organization, but by the WebSphere business unit itself. This is the appserver based on the Apache Geronimo project that came to IBM through last year’s acquisition of Gluecode.
Although WAS Community Edition will reside in the mother ship, it will be sold differently for obvious reasons. As a commodity product lacking the margins of IBM’s higher end flagship offering, it will continue being sold through channels.
IBM also views Global Services, which already has 9000 consultants who are either contributing or implementing open source technologies, as ready to help larger enterprise customers make the transition to open source.
IBM sees the desktop as the next major product sector for open source. It views market growth depending on two pillars: getting a neutral client platform to eliminate the need to develop or port separate versions of software products, and getting a critical mass of category killer products that will run on those open source platforms.
So it views the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) as, in effect, the virtual platform by which apps could be developed with a single code base and then run on Linux and the Mac, in addition to Windows. As for category killer, it pointed to tow Lotus products that have recently been ported to Linux: Lotus Notes, which IBM boasts 125 million clients, and SameTime IM clients.
When IBM boasts of the potential of the open source market, it is envisioning a large tent that includes platforms like Linux, plus open source or proprietary products that run on Linux. That’s the rationale for including DB2 Express-C, which is a free entry level product that is not open source, but is offered as bundled stack with WAS Community Edition.
IBM listed four areas, which it considers ripe for open source. In addition to client side frameworks such as the Eclipse RCP and client apps like Linux-based Notes, they included: middleware with WebSphere Community Edition; Systems management leveraging Tivoli technologies and storage management coming out of the Aperi project; data servers based on Apache Derby and the free DB2 Express-C (which is a different product and code base); and grid computing, with support for the Open Grid Services Architecture and the Globus Alliance.
IBM also listed several areas of longer term open source R&D including Cell BE multimedia processors; extensions to security-enhanced Linux; and virtualization, where it recently contributed technology from its IBM Director systems management product to what it called the community.
