Service Demand Is Lagging Linux Growth

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February 02, 2000 (2:23 PM EST)

By Mo Krochmal,

NEW YORK -- Compaq says demand for Linux among its largest business customers is exploding, but it's not finding a matching need for services.

Compaq, IBM, and other large IT vendors last summer announced new service and tech support offerings to targeting enterprise users of Linux, a free operating system software that has evolved out of the Unix operating system.

"We aren't seeing the [services] growth we thought we would," said Glenn Johnson, director of the Linux program at Compaq, at LinuxWorld on Wednesday.

Still Linux use is exploding. Shipments of systems pre-loaded with Linux are expected to soar 25 percent through 2003. That is double the percentage growth predicted for other workstation and server systems in the $9.5 billion operating systems market, according to International Data Corp., a Framingham, Mass.-based researcher.

Based on that explosion, Compaq continues to beef up its Linux service offering. Later this week, the Houston-based PC maker will announce a service partnership with Linux distributor Suse, Johnson said. Compaq already has an agreement with Red Hat, the leading Linux distributor.

Other vendors are also staking claims in the corporate Linux services space.

Angstrom Microsystems of Boston, Mass., a 15-employee start-up, is using this week's LinuxWorld to roll out a package of hardware, software, and services, targeting small and midsize companies using its server loaded with Linux.

"We provide low to mid-level companies wanting to get to market online with speed," said Lalit Jain, Angstrom's CEO.

Expect more IT companies to look at offering these types of services, said Don Haback, a partner at the Matterhorn Group, an IT consultancy in Great Neck, N.Y.

"The IT community is looking at the whole area of Linux," Haback said. "Most of the applications are not large enterprise class yet and the IT community has had to deal with the hard deadlines of Y2K."

Large businesses drove the demand for services from IT vendors as a security blanket, Johnson said.

"They wanted to know that it was available," he said. "But they haven't deployed it yet. It's still in the development stage."

At IBM, service calls for Linux are 35 percent of the volume of calls for AIX, IBM's version of Unix, said Katalin Walcott, Linux services executive at IBM Global Services.

"The volume is low but not as low as we thought it would be," Walcott said. "The Linux user is savvy, but as we start to see it in clusters and more complex uses, service will be more important."