"Linux – Meeting Today’s Business Challenges"

Lee Fitzgerald of SY introduced our speaker, Nikki Gray from Novell. Nikki has been with Novell for 15 years, in their own IT department supporting Novell users and also in customer services and the pre-sales team. At the outset of the meeting Nikki said that, whilst covering the topics outlined in the programme for the evening, she would also like to include any areas of special interest to the audience. Several people mentioned topics and she incorporated these in her talk. She encouraged questions and promoted discussion during the evening.

Nikki started the evening by talking about reducing costs, manageability issues and support costs. Linux is often seen as a “reduce costs Nirvana” but then, during implementation, the organisation meets the OSINTOT syndrome (being “Oh sugar, I never thought of that”). Novell can help with making Linux viable for that organisation by providing training and by selecting appropriate business partners to help that organisation (regardless of which distribution of Linux is being used).

SuSE Linux has a reputation for being reliable and scalable. Once installed and properly configured it just keeps running. This gives users confidence regarding the availability of their system.

Nikki went on to use Novell’s own migration to open source to illustrate some of the aspects that an organisation might face whilst migrating. Because they have done this migration themselves (e.g. during July 2004 they moved 1200 desktops from Microsoft software to open source based) they have first hand experience which might be of help to others.

• They had identity management in place. This means that when they create a user, that person automatically gets the right home directory, provisioned services etc. It works across Microsoft, Netware, Linux and AIX. This approach saved money and made it more efficient for users. When they come to migrate a user they look at what that user has/needs. Having determined this they look for open source alternative(s). If there isn’t any then they see if there is another way of getting the service onto the desktop e.g. putting a web front end on something to get a single view across disparate systems.
• There were some Windows 32 applications that had no obvious open source equivalent.
• There were lots of back end systems e.g. SAP. Web front ends were developed.

As a lot of their users are mobile, using laptops, tablet pcs etc., the approach taken is to make everything available through a web browser. Novell didn’t anticipate the impact of poor infrastructure in certain geographic areas on this approach. In these areas various midway approaches have been adopted e.g. working offline and synchronising when possible.

It was useful to have an example migration to discuss and there were plenty of questions from the audience throughout the presentation. Nikki stayed on for a while for people to ask specific questions. It was a stimulating evening.

Margaret Moore