Hardware and software heavyweights, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, have added their voices to a groundswell of opinion that Linux has arrived as a mainstream enterprise operating environment.

HP and Oracle, which have both committed to a major presence at Australia’s first LinuxWorld Expo & Conference in Sydney next year, say that a large percentage of their clients are now moving from proprietary platforms to Linux.

“We are having the same experience that HP had when our clients moved from proprietary platforms to Unix, except that they’re moving to Linux,” says Anupan Nagar, Linux product development manager at HP. “Now customers are coming to us asking for Linux. Most of our customers want to do more with less and Linux falls into the sweet spot.”

According to Nagar, claims that Linux is not enterprise strength, such as those made in March by EDS, are simply not valid. “There are now a huge number of projects that Linux has been proven on,” says Nagar. Likewise, claims by detractors that Linux would fork into different flavours, like Unix did, are also not true, according to Nagar. “We are part of the Linux Standard Board, which has ensured that the Linux kernel won’t fork.”

From a software development point of view, Linux has support that is second to none, according to Tim Blake, principal solution architect, Oracle Asia Pacific. “We have seen the growth of Linux to the point where it is now a primary platform that all of our development is done on,” says Blake. “All of our new products are now developed on Linux and 90% of our business applications were delivered on Linux last year. It is now a mature platform and an enterprise strength solution that delivers 30% cost savings.”

While both Nagar and Blake agree that Linux is still primarily a server side operating system solution, both say that Linux for the desktop is inevitable. “My two kids use Linux laptops and they have the same level of functionality as other desktops,” says Nagar.  “Interoperability with Windows is evolving and the operating system is morphing every day.”