TD: So, you are really helping it along, rather than just trying to ride the dragon.

SH: We're putting gasoline on its fire.

We have a whole group. There are now several hundred people in our Linux Technology Center. That's outside of any IBM division. It's not in the Software group or the server group. They have this cool mission statement: "Make Linux better." There are a lot of different interests in the Linux community. Theirs is letting it scale to the enterprise. They have 50 defined open source projects. They are working on SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) scalability documentation. There are little things you need to be a really world-class operating system.

We can look at some of the world-class operating systems that scale, like Solaris or AIX, we can compare them to Linux, and we can help in the areas where we have some great operating systems taken. We are not saying we are better than any of the people there; we are just applying our resources in helping them get there.

TD: What role does Lotus play in all this?

SH: I have most of my real revenue generating initiatives on Domino for Linux. I think it's a real interesting phenomenon. There's a real, well-publicized two-horse race between Lotus Notes and Exchange. Now on Linux, there is no Exchange. It's a one horse race. That's all there is. SUSE in Germany has a bundle with Linux and Domino, and they are being very successful selling through partners in Germany.

They were saying that they were not being very successful since all their partners were not in the Lotus Business Partners Group. I was ecstatic! They brought in new partners! Incremental sales! Fantastic! "You guys have broken the code; need more marketing money?"

TD: It's expanding your grasp, definitely!

SH: It's incremental business for Lotus. So Lotus got really excited about it, as they should. Lotus has some good partners in Linux. I have two great marketing managers helping me on the Lotus side with Domino and Linux specifically. We are pleased with the results. We have four software brands: Lotus, Tivoli, DB2, and Websphere. So, Lotus is fully a quarter of everything we do. Their share of success with Linux is even more than that.

TD: I talk to the IT guys, and they tend to prefer Linux because it's a UNIX variant. They know how to take advantage of that.

SH: What's great about it is that while everybody's been running around saying, "Well, on Linux, there's no applications!" I've got 40,000 business partners who have applications, and they all run on Linux! There might be some references that have to be changed. Some forward slashes to backward slashes...

TD: That's why you have business partners.

SH: You don't have to port!

TD: The IT guy doesn't have to do it!

SH: You don't have to write 1s and 0s!

Theodore Durst is a Technical Editor for ZATZ:Pure Internet Publishing. He can be reached at theo_durst@zatz.com.