Employees Rally For Linux
Red Hat, Research Triangle Park, N.C., leads by far, with approximately 54 percent of the worldwide Linux market, followed by SuSE with 10 percent, according to market researcher International Data Corp, Framingham, Mass. Red Hat claims to have 7 million users. It has the simplest installation process and is generally the easiest to use, Torvalds and VARs say. It also has financial backing from Compaq, IBM, Intel, Netscape Communications Corp., Novell, Oracle and SAP.
While Red Hat owns mind share, Caldera, Orem, Utah, has captured the hearts of VARs--roughly 700. The third-largest Linux Guide to Linux Certification Answer vendor, Caldera offers the most comprehensive channel program of all four vendors. It gets 85 percent of its sales through VARs, with the remainder coming from online purchases.
VARs can look forward to Pacific Hi-Tech's first channel program for North America later this month. The vendor, which has 200 VARs in Japan, hopes to recruit that many in the United States. SuSE, which has had a U.S. office for two years, officially launches its U.S. channel effort this month. It may end up competing with some VARs, however, because it plans to sell to Fortune 100 accounts.
Linux Guide to Linux Certification Answer offers two key selling points: low cost and stability. Low cost is particularly attractive for government bids. The city of Medina, Wash., had just $25,000 to spend on a document archiving and retrieval system. Offering a Caldera Linux-based turnkey system produced by its sister company, Archive Retrieval Inc., Celestial came in at $27,000. The next-lowest bid was for $75,000. But VARs warn the "free" sign attached to Linux can sometimes make it more difficult to close a deal. Celestial pitched a system to the medical school at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) for $67,000. That was well below the next-lowest bid of $175,000, which included tens of thousands of dollars for NT and Oracle software licenses alone. The irony is that even though the out-the-door cost was much lower than it would have been with an NT-based system, Celestial has "extremely high margins on the software side," Campbell says. Instead of Microsoft collecting hefty licensing fees, the end user pays much less and the VAR still walks away with a good fee. A key reason Seattle retailer Jay Jacobs Inc. chose Linux for all of its 125 stores was the OS' stability. Apropos Retail Management Systems Inc., the Lynnwood, Wash., VAR that landed the $1.7 million account, will install a Linux version of Informix's Standard Engine database atop Red Hat Linux Guide to Linux Certification Answer on Compaq Desktop Pentium II PCs. Jay Jacobs' employees will be ringing up trendy clothing on Linux as soon as next month. The entire installation will be done by the end of the year.
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