Oracle Sees Rosy Linux Future
In a presentation that underscored Oracle Corp.'s support for Linux in the enterprise, Jim Enright, director of Oracle's Linux Program Office took the keynote stage at the Enterprise Linux Forum here on Wednesday to describe how the open-source OS helps Oracle customers and the company itself. Noting Linus Torvalds' historic 1991 Usenet Linux posting, in which the OS' creator wrote that he was "doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones," Enright said that today, Oracle is "aggressively" transferring its internal IT to Linux.
Looking ahead, Enright said he sees all of Oracle internal IT working on the Linux platform. Even now, he noted, all Oracle employees use Linux at some point in their workday.
Enright said that in addition to savings on upfront deployment, Linux reduces the cost of system management and support. While customers used to have to deploy different Oracle DBMSes on different boxes, Linux enables them to deploy, manage and upgrade an Oracle program on multiple systems running the same version of the Oracle database and the OS.
