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Work underway on Arabising Linux says IBM

DUBAI - IBM officials yesterday said that work was underway on Arabising Linux, the world's fastest growing operating system for government, enterprises and small and medium businesses.

Bashar Kilani, Software Group Manager for IBM Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan, said the world's largest IT company's development office in Cairo was involved in the project.

IBM officials said the open source Linux operating system has gone from strength to strength in the space of only five short years.

Kilani said: "We've seen our customers do some incredible things with Linux. One of the most powerful supercomputers in the world is running on Linux in Saudi Arabia, and several of our banking customers have migrated key systems to the platform. In a new, global economy where the Middle East can take its place as an equal player, open source reduces dependence on a particular software provider, and opens the doors of a local software development industry."

The strength of Linux was highlighted by Rob K Lamb, IBM's Worldwide Director of Linux sales, Soubi Chebib, Director of IBM brands, Gulf Business Machines.

Lamb said: "We believe that no one vendor can possibly have all the answers, and the only reasonable way to ensure that our customers can avoid vendor lock-in, and maintain the flexibility needed to rapidly incorporate products and technologies based on value and not on proprietary constraints, is through open standards."

As technical skill levels in the Middle East steadily rise, there is a growing case for the region to become a technology developer and innovator, rather than a consumer of technologies developed elsewhere. Linux allows developers and engineers in this region to customise it for their requirements, and develop new technologies that can, in turn be shared with the rest of the world through the open source community.

IBM officials said apart from the freedom to choose a hardware platform that fits an organisation's needs best, Linux has massive cost advantages.

According to a study by the Robert Francis Group in 2002, in the first year of ownership, Linux cost $50 000, Sun's Solaris $422 000, Windows $92 000. After three years these figures increase to $74 000, $562 000 and $191 000, respectively. They said IBM made a firm commitment to Linux two years ago, and today over 200 IBM software products run on this operating system, including Tivoli, DB2, Lotus, WebShpere, and Rational, as well as host of development tools. IBM offers Linux on all of its enterprise platforms, including its mainframe servers.

This support for Linux is not only at the high end: for the smaller business, IBM's "Express" offerings of its data management, collaboration, systems management and Web services software are all available on Linux.

In the application development space, IBM has contributed over $40 million worth of product code to the open source community as the foundation for Eclipse, an open source integrated (software) development environment.

The IBM also contributed to the evolution of the J2EE specification and provided the base for XQuery, the Worldwide Web Consortium's (W3C) specification for a query language for XML.

This year alone, IBM won the "Best Development Tool" and "Best Data Storage Solution" awards at LinuxWorld for WebSphere Studio and Tivoli. References of famous companies using Linux already abound, including Sony UK, weather.com, Korean Air, Safeway and British Telecom.

In the Middle East, the most famous case study is the Egyptian museum's multimedia handheld "Digital Guides" for visitors, which is based on IBM's Digital Media technology running on Linux.

Kilani said: "It is exactly one year since we had our extremely successful Linux symposium in Bahrain, the first major Linux event in the Middle East. This year, we're now talking implementation and development issues to enterprises and governments that already have production Linux systems running. Its momentum in the region is unstoppable."

They said there are over 4,800 Linux applications in IBM Global Solutions Directory with over 2,500 having IBM Software content, while 34,000 Windows and Intel developers are now working with IBM software to build Linux applications. Up to 23 per cent of developers internationally are currently writing Linux applications. Forty eight per cent say they will absolutely or probably write Linux applications in 2003.