All IT roads lead to China

IT LOOKS like the big four IT companies are currently looking to China as a way of boosting revenue and profits. From the wording of their various announcements it is not so easy to discover the parts of the market that each of these companies will be targeting.

The first of the recent spate of announcements came on 17 November when Sun Microsystems said at Comdex that they had signed a deal with the China Standard Software Co. (CSSC), a group of companies supported by the Chinese government, for them to use Sun's Linux desktop software, the "Java Desktop System".

CEO McNealy said ""We're going to immediately roll out the Java Desktop System to between a half million and a million desktops in 2004. It makes us instantaneously the No. 1 Linux desktop player on the planet."

Then in an interview here HP's Linux boss Martin Fink said "I'm in the process of doing a reality check. I was personally in China a couple of months ago. I signed a deal with Red Flag Software, which has 90 percent of the Linux desktops in China. (With Sun's announcement), I'm really confused--is everybody buying two? It didn't add up for me. If I've got the relationship with Red Flag, I have no answer for how Sun could possibly be doing that much business."

And on the 4th of December, a press release from Dell announced that it had certified the Red Flag version of the Linux operating system for use on its Dell PowerEdge servers and made it available immediately on selected PowerEdge servers in China.

Piau Phang Foo, president of Dell China, said "Our customers in China have asked us to add Red Flag to our offerings and we are pleased to do so. Dell has committed significant engineering and development resources to Linux in direct response to customer requests for Unix alternatives. We will continue to advocate Linux for use in high-performance computing clusters and Oracle database support."

From all of this it looks like Sun's Java Desktop System will be available on machines from HP, Dell and we guess maybe on Sun's own hardware. It also looks like we might see something of a turnaround in target markets with HP having a large part of the desktop business but Dell possibly having a good piece of the server business.

All roads lead to China in the software market too.

On Wednesday, 10 September, IBM announced that it had signed a deal with a Chinese distributor to bundle DB2 Express with Red Flag Linux for small and medium-sized businesses. This announcement came not long after rival Oracle said that it would certify its software with Red Flag Linux.

And who started all this? It may have been Compaq. As far back as March 2000 it announced through its Hong-Kong office that in a joint venture with Red Flag they had launched China's first Red Flag Linux Certification and Support Programme for independent software vendors (ISVs). Presumably if it was offering certification on its own machines, Compaq had already certified the use of Red Flag Linux on its systems.

This announcement from Compaq included a comment by Enrico "The Cloak" Pesatori, who was then the senior vice president and group general manager, Enterprise Solutions and Services Group of Compaq Computer. He said "Providing full support for multiple operating systems, including Linux, is key to Compaq's continued development of eBusiness solutions."

Oh well. µ