Linux bosses see no gain in meeting needs of SME businesses

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 7 Oct 2004 at 12:37

But it still leaves SME businesses very much out in the cold as to having their business needs met by Linux.

Asked how the sector could benefit from Linux, the executives fell over themselves extolling the virtues of Linux.

'You have an incredible opportunity,' said HP's Mike Balma, 'Where you can really add value.'

Red Hat's Open Source VP Michael Tiemann, said: 'Smaller companies have the opportunity to do it right. After we IPO'd we went through a period of rapid growth, expanding our infrastructure. But it took a long long time to pull out all the garbage built around the proprietary axle [associated with that growth]. We worked hard pulling out all that stuff that was getting in our way.'

But without addressing issues such as missing applications, these are just words.

IBM's Jollans said that the 'Big companies can help smaller ones to write and port applications to Linux,' and Novell's Green agreed that more needed to be done to partner with small Linux businesses, and offer things such as free training, to engender that grass roots level support so vital to SMEs.

Certainly someone needs to step in and plug the gaps that still create a barrier to Linux adoption in the SME space. The great Linux debate seems to be whom.