Linux in Government: Winning in the Big Enterprise Space

In December 2003, a sound byte in the media mentioned an enterprise
alliance, not unlike hundreds we have read in the past. This time, six Linux
distributors--Red Hat, SuSE, Miracle Linux, Turbolinux, Red Flag and
Conectiva--joined with BakBone Software to form what they called the
Linux Advantage. The aim of the alliance was to provide another enterprise move
to bolster Linux.

The sound byte had all the trimmings of so many others
we have heard before. Peter Eck of BakBone provided the
required quote, saying that their product would "aggressively
accelerate their Linux adoption plans". Peter Galli of
eWeek
quoted
a senior software engineer and an executive of SuSE. It all
looked like another reengineered press release made to sound like a big
story. This story would have made Linux stocks jump a few years ago,
but in December 2003, it had all the pizazz of a yawn.

So what happened? BakBone winds up grabbing a huge contract win:
supporting the new server integration project for the United
States Courts. Turns out that the Judiciary started migrating its core
applications to HP ProLiant servers running Linux. The internal staff
of the courts went looking for a solution to meet its needs and found
BakBone, and that recommendation led to the contract award.
The Federal Courts
As recently as August 2003, the Administrative Office of the US Court (AOUSC)
was said to provide services to approximately 30,000 federal judges and
court staff at approximately 800 sites. The AOUSC, the administrative arm
of the federal judicial branch, provides services to the federal courts
and judges in the areas of administration, program management and
policy development.

At least one of AOUSC's vendors, American Management Systems (AMS), provides
the district court financial management solution, Momentum. Momentum
runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. AMS is reported to have its solution
in 94 district courts. AMS said it is the AOUSC's largest financial
services vendor.

AOUSC also awarded a $9 million contract in November 2003 to migrate the
federal courts national information technology infrastructure to the
Linux/Intel platform. That's a fair commitment to a low-cost solution,
under the cloud of alleged copyright infringement with not much in the
way of indemnification.

AOUSC began moving its case management, finance and accounting, probation,
pretrial services and case-tracking management systems to Linux from
Solaris, which AOUSC uses on Intel's x86 server architecture. The move
from Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advance Server seems familiar
to other initiatives in global enterprises.

The migration from Solaris/x86 to Linux/x86 will be
managed by in-house staff, according a story by Michael S. Mimoso.
In
his story, Mimoso quoted Karen Redmond as saying "contractual
assistance will be used as needed to augment in-house staff in
providing additional technical and logistical support for the nationwide
transition".
Linux in the Government
Stories of large Linux deployments grab the attention of enthusiasts
and people looking for opinion leadership in industry. Few readers
gravitate to stories about firms who do the heavy lifting in the
enterprise space. Not too long ago, we saw a lot of criticism that
Linux was not ready for primetime because it lacked commercial support
and maintenance. Then, we saw criticism because Linux lacked commercial
applications. As commercial applications arrived, Linux was said to lack
enterprise tools. You get the picture.

So what did the US Courts need in order to feel comfortable with Linux as an
enterprise solution? They decided they needed an enterprise backup and
restoration system that can get everything up and running quickly. AOUSC's
in-house staff found one they liked and recommended it to the prime
contractor--Titan Corporation, a $2 billion national security
specialist for the US Government.

The staff at AOUSC liked BakBone's NetVault system, which runs on Linux
and supports heterogeneous environments. As I dug a little deeper, I
found out that the company has about a 20% share of the Linux backup
and restoration market, according to IDC. Looking further, BakBone provides governments with data protection and
the rapid recovery needed in mission critical situations, such as disasters.
Courts Changing Government Technology Trends
As I stated last week, "the government wants industry to bring solutions
to government problems rather than have government agencies develop their
own software. That makes it difficult for procurement officials to find
their best value proposition." In the same sense, the government rarely
goes looking for solutions.

The AOUSC has established a trend by migrating to Linux. Instead
of waiting for a proprietary-based industry to bring more of the same,
the Courts took the road of personal responsibility and made the
right choice. Perhaps other agencies and branches of government will
consider taking the Courts' approach in their next endeavor.

Andy Stein, the CIO of Newport News, Virginia, and project owner of
localgovernments.core.gov
wrote a paper last year that sums up the nature of government technology
in today's cities:

• New hardware technology and software systems hold the promise
  of significantly improving service delivery by local
  governments. Rarely does a community have the financial resources
  to exploit that potential fully. Most cities have become a
  patchwork of technology with legacy hardware and special
  systems existing alongside networks of distributed enterprise
  software.
• Even networks deployed in the last ten years exist as
  amalgamations of older software, such as Novell 3-4.0,
  Windows 95, Windows 98 and Window NT Server. Manufacturers no
  longer support these older software systems and the hardware
  on which they run fail often.
• New systems offered by independent software vendors (ISV's)
  carry new licensing schemes that increase the total
  cost of ownership of computing. Cities face spending more money
  upgrading to newer systems, or risk failure of older systems. With
  the evolution of technology this problem continues
  to grow.

Government units from municipalities to Cabinet-level agencies may
recognize the state of their infrastructure and take the Court's lead
before signing more contracts for proprietary solutions. In fact,
Congress simply might suggest that government procurement in every nook
and cranny simply stop. We should stop buying anything unless it
truly provides the best value proposition.
What About the Vendor
People wanting a warm and fuzzy story about an open-source company
giving away its core products will not find it here. BakBone
follows a business model that someone might call second-generation Linux.
BakBone belongs to the
Open
Source Development Lab, which uses and enables Linux. BakBone's role at
OSDL allows Linux to focus on enterprise data protection technologies.

The company's key product, NetVault Enterprise Edition, provides
diverse platform backup and restore solutions. If I have one of those
amalgamations of older software systems, NetVault gives me a way to
back up everything. It also provides ways to bring systems and database
applications back on-line without having to reconstitute the system. Its
real-time capabilities of restoration impressed me, especially after having
coped with reviving mail solutions in the aftermath of 9/11.

Governments in particular can benefit by using a recovery
system designed for heterogeneous UNIX, Windows NT/2000, Linux and
Netware enterprise environments. NetVault allows administrators to add
and configure new servers, devices and clients and control them from
a central location with less effort than what they are accustomed.

I also discovered that BakBone has a sweet spot in the small- to
medium-sized business market. So, although the company can enable large
Linux enterprises, they also can work for my local media client who has three
times the number of servers and workstations than he does employees.

BakBone is helping to make Linux a more accepted solution.
Implementations such as the one the Federal Courts have made make people
think twice before they dismiss Linux for whatever reason. As an
analyst, I liked what I saw of BakBone.
Some Things to Take Home
BakBone's success should remind us that we cannot overlook
the possibility that even the smallest sound byte may have
significance. I recognize that sometimes information overload can lead
to a state of mind in which we become numb to everything. But, can we
afford to take for granted things that could transform the quality of
our lives at any point in time?

Sometimes our logic blinds us to possibilities. I wonder who would
have expected to see such companies as Hewlett Packard, IBM, Dell, Oracle,
Titan or BakBone joint-venturing with a company such as Red Hat two
or three years ago?

Finally, consider that while an allegation of copyright infringement
exists in the Federal Courts today, those same courts have decided to
migrate to the alleged perpetrator in that case. It's something to
consider. As Søren Kierkegaard once said, "Irony is a disciplinarian
feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do."

Tom Adelstein works as a Linux consultant and specializes in
identifying opportunities for open-source software in organizations.
He's the coauthor of the upcoming book, Exploring Linux with the Java
Desktop System, published by O'Reilly and Associates. He also works with
the Open Source Software Institute. He recently published two articles
in Forbes about open-source software and JBOSS. He also has written
numerous articles as a guest editor for a variety of publications.