Developer interest in OpenSolaris in Asia is brewing, but it remains to be seen if that has translated into services revenues for its creator, Sun Microsystems.
According to Sam Tan, South Asia product marketing manager at Sun, the number of OpenSolaris downloads worldwide in three months alone, between April and June this year, was over 1 million. China and Malaysia saw the highest number of downloads in Asia. During the same period last year, Tan said the company recorded just under 200,000 downloads worldwide.
In total, OpenSolaris has clocked five million downloads globally since its inception a year ago.
In Asia, OpenSolaris users groups have already been formed in most countries, including India and Singapore. According to Tan, most members of such user groups have been awed by the features in OpenSolaris, which were unknown to them before the product's source codes were released.
Rajnish Arora, research director of enterprise servers and workstations at IDC Asia-Pacific, said: "OpenSolaris will benefit the developer community because it gives them more flexibility when using it as a developer platform."
Although Sun does not monitor the number of applications ported to OpenSolaris by third-party developers, Tan claimed that the number of open-source applications for OpenSolaris has generally increased from a year ago.
Who are they?
In addition, because Sun does not track the profiles of users who download OpenSolaris, it is uncertain if fans of the operating system are technology hobbyists, or decision makers in their IT departments. This would be an important piece of data because it is in Sun's interest to lure IT head honchos with its support and maintenance services, should they choose to adopt OpenSolaris.
While Tan could not determine if new service revenues have been gained directly out of the OpenSolaris initiative, he noted that the effort has attracted customers in markets which Sun never had access to five years ago. "A lot of small companies are coming to talk to us, including those that were previously on the [Microsoft] Windows platform," he said.
Arora, however, noted that the open source appeal of OpenSolaris will not strike a chord with enterprises--for now.
He explained: "[Businesses] will not be 'gung-ho' about OpenSolaris since they're trying to move away from having to customize their [systems], to packaged products that meet the needs of their business processes. They want to spend more effort on innovation, rather than on support and maintenance."
Still, Arora noted that a stronger developer interest in OpenSolaris could potentially spur the platform's uptake among enterprises. "If there are more developers building applications for OpenSolaris, the chances of customers adopting the platform will be much higher," he said. "But it's not something that will happen overnight, because it takes time for developers to build applications."
"At the end of the day, enterprises choose operating systems based on the applications they want to run. Today, you make the decision to run Exchange, before saying you want to run it on Windows," he added.
James Lee, vice president of enterprise sales at IT services vendor ECS Computers, also a Sun partner, noted that interest in OpenSolaris has increased since the product turned open source. Though Lee declined to reveal revenue numbers from his company's Solaris business, he noted that "we are seeing [our customers] migrate from other platforms, including Unix and Linux, to OpenSolaris".
As a variant of the established Unix operating system, OpenSolaris, being free, has the potential to be a more affordable alternative to competing Unix-based proprietary platforms, such as IBM's AIX and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX.
But Arora noted that cost is just one part of the equation, noting that businesses would still have to pay Sun for software patches, updates and maintenance. Furthermore, most Unix migrations typically move toward Windows--not OpenSolaris or Linux--because of the bigger pool of applications available on the Microsoft platform, he said.
Although Sun has taken a bold step to make Solaris open source, rivals HP and IBM continue to guard their respective Unix OSes.
Karthik Ramarao, marketing manager of technology solutions at HP Asia-Pacific, said: "HP does not have any plans to make HP-UX open source. We have a clear direction that has inherent value. This is reflected in the strength of our position in the market, especially in the high- end where we are leaders."
Han Chung Heng, IBM Singapore's general manager of systems and technology group, said an appropriate strategy around open-source operating systems must focus on supporting applications, including Linux-based ones, around its proprietary AIX operating system.
Han said "thousands of thousands" applications are available on IBM's AIX 5L, and noted that the company has open-source tools that allow Linux applications to run in a native AIX 5L environment.
On the market traction of OpenSolaris so far, he said: "Very few non-Sun contributions have been accepted into OpenSolaris. Many in the industry see OpenSolaris primarily as an anti-Linux play by Sun."
Matt Thompson, Sun's director of technology outreach and open source programs, told ZDNet Asia last year that OpenSolaris was never aimed at Linux.
Thompson said: "We look at Linux as another variant of Unix. We see Solaris and most of the Linux distributions as peers. The Linux movement is something that I want to see more of."
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