Theodore Ts'o wrote:Most business is in the SME (small-and-medium-sized enterprise) category. Certainly they make up the majority of customers for Enterprise Linux. These companies aren't the ones spending $1M for SAP, and a good many of them are not $50K database customers. You seem to be focusing only on the very high end.Why does Group 1 really care about running under Linux, as opposed to some other OS? Is it really about price sensitivity? If so, it's surprising because to the extent that they pay $50,000 for Oracle, or $1,000,000+ for SAP R/3, why should they care about the cost of $1500 for the RedHat or SuSE enterprise version of the distro? Group 1 does extensive internal development. They have no off-the-shelf solution, although they integrate proprietary applications into their process. I think their major complaint is that they can't get the attention they want from their vendor, because the vendor has larger markets with less sophisticated needs to pursue. Indeed, I have not met many SMEs that were able to get along without doing some of their own development or integration. At HP I spent a lot of time talking with financial companies - and these range from giants like HSBC, merely large companies like Merril Lynch and Fidelity, to small businesses - invariably did care about their platform as well as their solution software. Well, it seems that many businesses in their category make what I'd call "covert use" of Debian. To get them out of the closet, we need to develop a brand that their customers will respect. Even if the details of that brand are pretty irrelevant to the customers actual use.So why don't [the ISPs] just use Debian instead? Most of the business to be had is in the SMEs, and ISPs definitely fit that category.I will also note that ISP's are generally not generally regarded as "enterprise" customers. Business who get together can also negotiate better discounts from today's distribution vendors. It's already the case that very few people actually pay list price for commercial distributions....Yes. Group 1 told me what they were paying. It was a substantial discount, but still way too much. Thanks Bruce |