In October, the company finished the Linux transition for the 5,000 programmers of its Oracle Applications software. Now the transformation has begun for those who work on the database product, said Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux engineering, in an interview at the CeBit trade show in New York.
"By the end of the year, (Linux) is our core platform," Coekaerts said. Oracle is switching because Linux systems are less expensive and faster, he added.
Oracle's Linux efforts have caught on with customers, according to Gartner market data released Tuesday. In 2002, IBM led the market for database software on Linux, with US$67 million in sales to Oracle's $45 million. But in 2003, Oracle jumped into first place with US$207 million in sales to IBM's $85 million.
For its own development work, Oracle is switching from Sun Microsystems computers, he said. The new systems are provided by multiple computer makers and use several versions of Linux from the top two sellers of the open-source operating system, Red Hat and Novell.
It's not often that Oracle makes such a change. The last time it did so was in the early 1990s, moving from Digital Equipment's VMS to Sun's Solaris, he said.
Oracle isn't alone in embracing the open-source movement. Dell is switching internal servers to Linux, while Novell is dropping Windows in favor of its own Linux desktop software for PCs.
Windows is the most widely used server operating system; according to Gartner, 35.1 percent of the US$11.8 billion in servers sold in the first quarter of 2004 used Windows. But Oracle couldn't use Windows as its main developer environment because software written for Windows isn't portable to other operating systems, Coekaerts said.
Oracle is a major Linux backer. In addition to spending lavishly on its "unbreakable Linux" marketing campaign, it employs 14 developers who work on the kernel, or core, of Linux. The company helps fund work such as Red Hat security certifications.
At the same time, Oracle faces threats from the open-source realm. The MySQL database is gaining in popularity, while Computer Associates International this week announced a plan to make its Ingres database open-source software.
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Josh - 28/05/04
35.1% of $11.8 Billion? That's a useless statistic when it comes to comparing Others to Windows. All that statistic demonstrates is that Microsoft charges a lot more for their products. There would be no statistically accurate way to measure the amount and types of servers currently in use. I run a server from my Linux box at home but I certainly don't report that to anyone...
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Louis HR Muller - 12/07/04
Measuring only server sales doesn't allow for the inclusion of servers converted in-house to Linux. Anyone can install Linux on a computer without paying for a lisence thus the actual number of servers running Linux has to be much higher. For those of us that run Linux, the sense of reliability and security isn't even reflected in statistics. We just know we made the correct choice.
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