By the Computerworld Philippines Staff
May 1, 2007
Without a doubt, Linux is making waves in the Philippine enterprise space. This was the consensus among the IT heads of four of the country’s top companies who took part in Computerworld Philippines’ third CIO Roundtable for the year.
The four CIOs invited to participate in this issue’s roundtable feature were Henry Rhoel Aguda, chief information officer of Digital Telecommunications Philippines Inc.; Francis Cruz, IT consultant of 2Go Express; Kelsey Hartigan Go, executive vice president for IT, SM Prime Holdings Inc.; and Paul Zaldarriaga, vice president of corporate information management at Jollibee Foods Corp.
During the very lively two-hour discussion at Oakwood Premiere, the IT bosses—all of whom had a lot of enthusiasm for Linux—disclosed how their respective companies are benefiting from open source technology.
Computerworld’s monthly CIO roundtables are sponsored by HP Philippines Corp. and are moderated by the publication’s editorial team.
Excerpts of the roundtable discussion follow:
CWP: Various reports say that Linux use in the business world is growing rapidly. Is this true for your company?
Go: It’s growing. But, primarily, we use it as backend servers. We’ve been using Linux since 1999 even before I joined the company (SM). It saves on costs because before we used to buy SCO Unix where you’re limited by the number of users. With Linux, it operates the same way, never crashes, and is quite stable. My main reason, however, is I have familiarity with it.
Zaldarriaga: I would say in Jollibee it is a major thrust from our end. On a personal basis, I started using it in my previous job. I was running the software development subsidiary for a major multinational vendor and at that time we were running our Domino e-mail system on Windows NT. It reached the point where we really had to upgrade and so we attempted to migrate the Domino e-mail engine into Linux. In fact, my staff then was very reluctant because they didn’t know how these things were going to work. But I told them to go out and experiment, try it out. I told them if our e-mail system is not up on Monday, I promise I won’t get angry. And so they did it over the weekend and, by Monday, we were up. Domino ran on Linux, no problem, everything was working fine. But what we found out that in terms of overhead was that it actually used less memory and there was no performance degradation. That was my first personal experience.
And even before that I learned Linux from Dominique Cimafranca. In terms of advocacy, Dominique was really pushing us to use Linux because, according to him, this is the next wave. This was when Linux first came up. And so I asked him to teach my staff to develop Web sites on Linux. I wanted to look at a platform that we could offer small and medium enterprises. I felt if we can teach them how to use open source that would be an interesting play, because that would really be e-services, not software licensing just e-services. With Linux, we were able to again develop Web sites very easily. To my mind, that was the major paradigm. Linux now gives people an option. You don’t have to rely on proprietary platforms. The interesting thing is there are certain technologies that bring about other technologies or other paradigms. Linux would not have been possible without the Internet because that’s where you have the sharing. Without the Internet, open source will be nothing today.
Go: If I may add, a lot of people are concerned about the security of Linux. But, on the other hand, because it is open source, it is always up for scrutiny. In the global community, there’s a patch that comes out probably the day after anybody sees a bug. Because of this openness, people can see the loopholes and people accept that there are loopholes and they get fixed immediately. We are also doing a lot of Web development internally for applications. We have our legacy applications, our billing systems and so forth and so on but sometimes there are users who begin to read certain information and we need to come up with applications for them to represent these information at a quick and timely manner. So we came up with a Web-based application in less than a week using the Lamp model—like Linux, Apache, Mind Scale, Post Press and PHP. With those in place, it was very, very easy for us to roll out applications, and they’re Web-based. You don’t have to install it in the client. You just need a browser and that’s it.
Zaldarriaga: It’s interesting, you got the Internet, Linux, and Web-based applications, all these technologies are coming together and it’s good for the market. The driving force, to my mind, behind open source and maybe Linux—and this is what killed the mainframes and to a certain extent other hardware platforms—is the commodity pricing of hardware by Intel. For a very long time, Intel had to be on Microsoft and did not have the robust functionality of the operating systems of other units and mainframes. Now with Linux, what I’m seeing is that it’s the Unix people—because of their affinity with commodity hardware—who are bringing Linux to the Intel platform. So now, if you want to go to Intel, you have two choices: Microsoft and Linux. Everybody wants to be at the commodity Intel space. If you’re not there today, you’ll be paying an arm and a leg for it.
Cruz: When I joined the company (2GO) in 2002, they were running mission-critical systems on IBM. The company was growing very fast that the technology they had could no longer support the growth. So we had to buy new hardware. At that time, Oracle released a new version of database called 9i, which was the first version of Oracle that supports Linux. We needed to migrate all our databases to a new hardware or platform. So I was part of the team that conducted the study on whether to migrate to 9i on Linux or continue using IBM hardware. Based on the cost of the hardware, we would be sharing the same server to run around five databases each. But, at that time, no one else was using Linux for enterprise applications, especially for the mission-critical ones which generate around $8 billion or about P30 billion a day. So by migrating our systems to Linux, we were taking a big risk. Eventually, we decided to migrate to Linux in 2003. Oracle promised that they’ll be introducing clustering in the Linux version so in case one server goes down, the other one can take the load.
So for me, it was a very big challenge, especially knowing that we had that higher level of comfort in using the Unix OS, because we are also considering migrating everything to Linux using Intel hardware. While we were comfortable using the Unix OS, we decided to migrate the mission-critical databases to Linux on a clustered architecture, starting with the smallest applications. It took around two years to migrate all the mission-critical applications. Right now, all the mission-critical applications are running on Linux, which is still on Red Hat 2.1.
Aguda: For our company, our Linux adoption is not growing as rapidly as those of most companies, but it’s growing in a significant manner because now we’re realizing the advantages that it offers with some of the applications we’ve implemented Linux on. First, it’s very flexible to implement. Second, it’s quick to deploy. There are no issues on licensing agreements, and finally, it’s very cost-effective, especially when you’re launching something very quick and you need to experiment with a lot of stuff. The problem we usually have with implementing systems is we have to go through the regular process of getting the budget. Normally, if it’s a mission-critical application, the budgeting process will take a few months. But if you have a good idea that you need to deploy quickly, you can just get an ordinary computer loaded with the Linux variant of your choice and experiment with it. Launch it, and once you’ve launched it and established a proof-of-concept type of situation, you can go for a bigger system. So that’s where we’re finding Linux to be good at, and we’re seeing that on the server side of Linux we have a lot of advantages that we can explore.
CWP: Do you have any problems with top management in terms of justifying your use of Linux?
Aguda: Our top management is technology agnostic, so they will depend on the recommendation of technical experts. In our case, what we try to do is to present to the management something that will meet the business requirements, so it has to be cost-effective, quick to deploy, and easy to maintain. Total cost of ownership should be sensitive to the business’ state at that time, so if the appetite for the business is to save up on capital expenditure, then those are things that we look out for. I think Linux is something that can meet those requirements for as long as we use it for the right purposes.
CWP: What is your company’s strategy with Linux? How much does your company rely on Linux in achieving its goals?
Aguda: Right now, a small percentage. Still 95% of our applications are outside Linux, the 5% there would consist of Web-based applications, Web-based services that we need to experiment with, domain name services, and, essentially at this point, we’re still figuring out the right areas where we can deploy Linux, but it’s a technology that we need to adopt, we need to build expertise on, and once we do have that, I think that’s where Linux will fly as a technology platform in our company. But this year, we’ll be embarking on training some of our people on Linux, encouraging them to explore open source applications and, hopefully, we’ll get one major application again in Linux.
Go: Our ERP (enterprise resource planning system) runs on Linux. Our billing system runs on Linux. Our e-mail is running on Lotus Domino, which runs on Linux. Our firewall, our e-mail gateway, our DNS (domain name servers), our Web services—everything runs on Linux.
We do have proprietary operating systems as well because of the nature of the applications, but as much as possible, we try to find Linux counterparts for them. If we run it on Linux, not only do we save on license costs, because, well, at that time when we were just starting, we didn’t have to reboot our servers every week.
CWP: What proprietary software do you use?
Go: It depends on the application.
Zaldarriaga: In the case of Jollibee, there’s really no mandate to just stick to Linux or roll out Linux. I think when it makes business sense for us, when the application that we really want runs on Linux, we do that. Where there is a choice, and the economics are favorable, we would implement Linux.
Possibly Related Posts:
Loading ...
