Is Linux the biggest thing since the Internet?

The Linux operating system has many things in common with the Internet when it took off in the mid-1990s.

First, the system is free to the user. Secondly, there is a universal standard. And third the cost reduction possibilities are enormous.

For in the space of five years the open source Linux operating system has moved from being an academic interest to become the world's fastest growing operating system for government, enterprises and small and medium sized businesses.

In the Middle East, Standard Chartered Bank has become the first bank to migrate its retail and Internet banking systems to Linux. And AME Info moved to a Linux based platform with the launch of MyAME Info.com this spring.

Last week IBM finished a Linux road show that visited Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait and Dubai extolling the virtues of Linux. Freedom of choice, no lock-in with one vendor, and maximum return on investment, these were the themes that dominated the IBM argument.

Linux has considerable cost advantages. According to a study by the Robert Francis Group in the first year of ownership Linux cost an average of $50,000, Sun's Solaris $422,000 and Microsoft Windows $92,000. After three years these figures reach $74,000, $562,000 and $191,000 respectively.

IBM sees Linux now gaining an important foothold in the Middle East with one of the world's most powerful supercomputers now running on this system in Saudi Arabia. For its part the Big Blue has spent more than $1bn in enabling and developing Linux systems and, with a third of the Gulf computer market in the hands of IBM this is clearly a powerful pointer to the future.

It took the World Wide Web almost a decade to achieve the critical mass that produced the Internet Revolution. But it looks as though Linux is going to get their much more quickly and with equally devastating impact for existing operating system providers like Sun and Microsoft.

Where Linux will not have any great impact is in application software for e-business which is increasingly concentrated in the hands of SAP and Oracle.

However, IBM now has 200 software products running on Linux including data management, collaboration, systems management and web services. Needless to say IBM uses Linux itself with more than 1,400 production servers working worldwide.

Remember all those internal management meetings in the late 1990s on 'What do we do about the Internet?' Today every company should be holding top level discussions on 'What do we do about Linux?