In our last article we read about IBM’s collaboration with Red Hat over the Cloud Computing Platform. As the technology market moves rapidly towards a service based industry from a products based industry, competitiveness in operational efficiency is of paramount importance. Today starting a software business does not depend on hefty capital requirements. All one has to do with a sound business proposition is to contact a Cloud service provider and get going. So what distinguishes a failed start up from a successful business is often invariably the Service. And with a host of vendors available, competition is fierce.

IBM is not the only company which has shifted to the cloud. Giants like Google and Amazon have gone for it too and Microsoft is expected to join the fray very soon. Now with clients demanding the best of service from their suppliers, it is indeed a level playing field for competition to blossom. But have you noted something? The Cloud offerings of all these companies run on Linux.

So why Linux? What is it which is driving all these companies towards using Linux as the operating system of cloud computing platform? We shall endeavor to answer this basic question as simply as we would like to understand it.

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When it comes to opting for a development platform, nobody has managed to elbow out Linux. It is the most preferred operating platform and its acceptance has steadily gained in the market. Numerous companies have now started developing on Linux and this shift in preference has forced companies like IBM and Google to develop their Cloud services on the Linux platform. Technically speaking Linux is open and not designed for a specific hardware requirement. It can run on multiple options thereby giving leverage to vendors, who now have to spend as much as 50 percent less for developing massive data storage facilities.

Talking about Power Management, Linux platform has gained tremendously due to collaborations between companies such as Red Hat, Novell and IBM. Moreover due to its versatile nature, there is always a lot of innovation carried out by independent and hired developers who just cant get enough of the platform. Such a wide spread acceptance has helped the aforementioned companies to bring down the cost of maintenance with respect to operations and data storage centers.

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As Open Source expert Jzemlin says, “Linux can be optimized for powerful parallelized computing to run these types of environments efficiently. IBM is using KVM, built into every Linux kernel, to power their offerings and partnering with Red Hat, a company based entirely on open source and known for its technical skills and high levels of service”. Most companies depend on suppliers to provide them with the necessary software to run their businesses. Any delay or a loss of access can push the client company into a state of operational darkness and eventually financial oblivion. The option of working on an Open source platform eliminates this risk. And this might be the single biggest advantage off using Linux as a platform.

A peep in to the history of technology companies will reveal that countless start up ventures died a premature death for lack of operational efficiency. They allowed poor development and operational issues sink their companies and provided a bad customer experience. Several of them failed because they did not scale up their operations in sync with popular demands and one reason for not being able to do that was their operating platform. No doubt, Google has a lot to thank Linux for as their search engine has grown and fed on this very platform. The IBM-Red Hat news comes as a very pleasing surprise but this could just well be the beginning. Hopefully there is a lot more good news pertaining to open source cloud computing in store.