Making Deployment and Migration of Business
Applications to Linux a Reality
Benefits of Linux
Stability, performance, scalability, better empowerment of I.T. organizations
to control their destiny –vs- proprietary software solutions. These
are the benefits of Linux-based applications. The Open Source empowers
software users to control the future of the systems they use. Proprietary
power is taken away from the Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s)
and is handed over to the software users themselves. Other advantages
to migrating to Linux and Open Source are the increasing availability
of battle-tested Web-enabled products and databases. The Open Source community
has produced robust products that are easier to maintain, operate with
lower dependence on network bandwidth, and reduce the overhead of backup,
recovery, fail-over, and upgrades.
Companies that migrate their business applications to Linux-based networks
can achieve substantial savings in a short amount of time. Organizations
have experienced a payback or return on their investment in Linux five
to six times faster by migrating business applications to the popular
open-source operating system over other common server technology. The
key contributors to this savings are proper strategic planning and the
advantages of implementing an Open Source network environment.
New York City Council
Long-time Novell and GroupLink user, the New York City Council is well
underway with its IT infrastructure migration to Linux. It has been a
stage-by-stage process for them and a glowing success because they didn’t
boil the ocean by taking it on all at once. For customer organizations
like the New York City Council, the move to Linux was the answer to their
needs for lower overall purchase price and cost of ownership, Web-based
solutions, modifiable technology, and easier integration into legacy applications.
How to Migrate to Linux
Organizations talking about Linux are trying to decide how to properly
implement it into their business-technical operations. With appropriate
planning, companies can move their business applications to a Linux platform
and enjoy significant return on investment while working with a less intrusive
network infrastructure.
One option is to combine Linux server capabilities with Server-side business
applications. Much like the mainframe days of old, where all applications
ran on a central computer, a return to this architecture can be a boon
for IT advancements and makes things like backup, recovery, failover and
systems redundancy almost a no-brainer. Thus, the risk of running business
applications on one machine has been greatly reduced. By utilizing the
single-server philosophy, it becomes possible to disinter- mediate levels
of complexity from the architecture. In the mainframe days, you had a
“dumb terminal” on your desk. If you don’t need to install,
maintain and upgrade software on every desktop, isn’t that a lot
easier to maintain architecture? We’re not suggesting that you throw
out all your PC’s and get dumb terminals, but if a number of business
applications were server side they wouldn’t require much resources
on the desktop. It’s a step toward simplification and can extend
the life of the desktop PC’s.
Linux migration success comes by not taking everything on all at once
and following through to the end with the strategy. A common pitfall to
avoid is forgetting to take “baby steps” or not moving forward
with a “stage-by-stage” migration to Linux.
We are telling businesses and other organizations (e.g., government,
academic, service, etc.) to begin the migration at the services level—their
directory, print and database systems. Also, companies should enable their
proprietary software products to run on the Open Source Linux platform.
Another primary success factor is that software products and services
become thin-client or server-based, rather than fat-client side applications.
The key actions to appropriate strategic planning for the migration and
deployment to Linux are:
- Specify a Linux provider—One of the largest, most stable providers
currently is Novell with its Novell Nterprise Linux Services (NNLS).
- Start with services—Don’t feel you have to move everything
at once. Make it a true migration by moving business services first.
- Upgrade your business applications to open-source—Choose a successful
first business application on Linux. Business applications like GroupLink’s
Collaborative Customer Engagement™ (CCE™) for leads generation,
sales force automation, and customer satisfaction are updated for open-source
environments allowing organizations to brand and modify applications
to meet specific needs.
- Where possible, phase out client-side applications—Linux’
open-source capabilities allow applications to be Web-based, eliminating
the need for client applications, thereby increasing efficiency and
lowering total cost of ownership.
Our Philosophy
At GroupLink, we recently completed the migration of our proprietary business
applications to Linux, which we credit, along with helping fellow long-time
clients migrate, as the opportunity to learn the best lessons. We have
found that a simple, lean, cost effective system is the best thing we
can offer to our customers. Therefore we’ve adopted the server-side
architecture model. All of our applications may reside on a single server,
allowing our users to instantly deploy our products to any desktop utilizing
Internet Explorer – no other software is needed. This is a very
simple model and can extend the life of every desktop PC in the organization
because the real processing power is contained on the server. Performance
increases can be realized by upgrading the one server instead of the multiple
desktops. Additionally, I.T. overhead is greatly reduced as only one server
need be maintained to ensure that business critical applications are safe.
Not only is Open Source the answer for lower total cost of ownership
and the least invasive to current infrastructure and people, but also,
with the exception of data integrity components, we predict that the days
of completely closed source systems are ending. Businesses, as well as
government, academic and service organizations require technology that
is a tight fit to their needs. They must have software that is modifiable
and configurable by the front-line IT staff. With Open Source these organizations
have the advantages of branding and integrating other products—even
legacy systems.
Brad Porter is Chief Technical Officer of GroupLink Corp., a software
provider for Collaborative Customer Engagement™ (CCE™) solutions
in qualified leads generation, sales force automation, and customer satisfaction.
Porter has over 25 years of expertise in directing development efforts
in the engineering and hi tech fields. Contact him at info@grouplink.net
or visit www.grouplink.net.
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