* Why go Linux desktop?
With Microsoft’s Windows Vista due out next year, many enterprises are getting ready for the changeover, with concerns about compatibility, security and cost. But one Linux vendor executive says piloting Linux desktops is another step enterprises should take in preparation of the upcoming desktop shift.
“We think that the next six months are a very important time for the industry, because early 2007 is when large enterprise customers will have to make their Vista decision. Vista is going to be a very important decision for them,” says Novell CTO Jeffrey Jaffe.
Without (too much) evangelizing of the Linux desktop over Windows, Jaffe says enterprise users should at least consider alternatives in advance of the Vista launch as a course of due diligence.
“What we’re telling folks … is that if you’re going to make such an important decision, you should have an in-depth knowledge of the fact that for the first time there really is choice. There really is an alternative,” he says. Promoting his own company’s product – SuSE Enterprise Linux Desktop 10 – Jaffe says the look-and-feel of OpenOffice 2.0 applications and other features offer an equivalent desktop experience at “one-tenth the cost” of desktops loaded with the Microsoft operating system and applications.
“For a class of users, not everyone, not for the power user, but for a class of users – it has everything that you want, plus a lot of innovation,” Jaffe says of his upcoming Linux desktop. He adds that pilots inside an enterprise with a dozen, 100 or 300 users, depending on the company’s size, should be sufficient to make a decision on the value and potential of Linux desktops in an enterprise.
“Come February next year, you have to make the decision,” Jaffe says. “[If] you want to go only Vista, and not have Linux at all, we’ll respect that. But for a class of customers and a class of users, we think that if they evaluate [Linux], the market pull will come from that.”
