A UniForum White Paper
From UniForum, the International Association of Open Systems Professionals
Sponsored by Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett Packard Co., IBM, Pyramid Technology, SCO, Silicon Graphics Inc., SunSoft, Tandem Computers and Unisys.
Your business requires flexibility, interoperability, and rapid response
to change--requirements that proprietary systems were never designed to
deliver. You're looking for more open alternatives to your mainframe and
for more robust alternatives to your departmental systems. You want technology
solutions that will give you seamless access to data, easy integration,
rapid portability, and above all, a real competitive advantage.
Fortunately, such solutions are available today. Read on to hear what business
users say about Unix and why it dominates the server and workstation marketplaces.
The Unix operating environment offers an alternative that puts you, not
the vendor, in control of information technology decisions. The Unix alternative
balances cooperative, open systems development with the advantages of a
freely competitive market. With Unix, multiple vendors share an open architecture,
but they compete on price, performance, and innovation. They earn the right
to your business over and over again in the open market, rather than locking
you into single-vendor solutions.
Unix is about choice: the freedom to choose the best hardware, the best
operating system, and the best applications and development environments,
and the freedom to change your mind when your business needs change. Users
like choices--that's one reason why Unix installations are growing at nearly
18 percent per year in all multiuser environments, when industry growth
as a whole is at just seven percent. As Janelle Hill, an information systems
manager at MCI responsible for sales force technical support, says, "Moving
to Unix has given us control over our own destiny."
There is one basic reason why Unix remains the premier enterprise operating
system and the only operating system that can span your organization's computing
needs from palmtops to massively parallel supercomputers: Unix is an open
technology.
But it seems that every vendor now is claiming to be "open." Let's
review what that word means to computing and why it's important.
Open means that the specification for a technology is published
and freely available. No single vendor can control it. Anyone can use, develop,
and improve the technology at any time, without permission from a vendor
and with little or no capital investment. Many implementations of the specification
evolve, and the input of multiple vendors is required to change the specification.
In mature open technologies, conformance tests exist to certify that a specification
is met. This model gives the user the ultimate flexibility and freedom of
choice. If you are dissatisfied for any reason, or if a better product exists,
it is a relatively trivial task to port applications to a competitive system.
In short, this market is characterized by users' ability to easily replace
one vendor with another. Unix meets all of these criteria.
When a technology is truly open, it takes on a life of its own. Open technologies
lead to a market characterized by rapid innovation and intense competition.
Whereas a single company, no matter how large, can invest only a finite
amount of money in research and development, open technologies benefit from
a vast number of technologists, all working in a shared development environment
that moves forward rapidly. We estimate that companies spend $1 billion
annually on Unix research and development.
The World-Wide Web is one recent example of how open technologies can outperform
single-vendor development. After only a few short years, the Web has become
a mainstream communications tool. No single company could have afforded
to launch the Web with as much success. The Web itself, of course, is built
on the Internet, a fundamental open technology that has grown along with
Unix.
Unix has enjoyed an open, cooperative development environment for over 25
years. As a result, it has become the most flexible, scalable, and robust
operating system available today. And because Unix is open, it will continue
to evolve more rapidly, and to provide better solutions to users, than any
single-vendor operating system possibly can.
The first great benefit that Unix systems give you is the ability to
replace one vendor with another, as your business needs change and as one
vendor or another takes the lead in providing ground-breaking new value.
No other operating system gives you that range
of flexibility.
"Open systems have made our vendors much more responsive," says
Hugh Brownstone, vice president of new business development for IMS America,
Ltd., a division of Dun & Bradstreet. "We're able to capitalize
on a Darwinian environment. It's survival of the fittest. We win, because
we are able to choose the best solution available in the market."
Competition for your business leads to technical excellence in Unix systems
that is unmatched by any other operating system. Eager to differentiate
their products from competitors, Unix suppliers have introduced innovations
in user interfaces, application development tools, and systems and network
management. The robustness of its core architecture has made Unix virtually
the only alternative for companies wanting to run critical applications
in a distributed environment. And many of the technologies that Unix has
made possible in the scientific and engineering environments--such as object
database management, three-dimensional graphics, simulation technologies,
and virtual reality--are becoming increasingly important to commercial users.
Competition also means superior performance at lower prices. A better price/performance
ratio has, for example, allowed IMS America to provide the kind of detailed
point-of-sale market data that its client pharmaceutical companies demand.
Three years ago, based on a mainframe, IMS America had to make do with wholesale
data, which required much less computing power. "We've been running
a 1.4 terabyte farm of Unix-based systems since 1993," says Brownstone.
"We just couldn't afford to do that on a mainframe. Our documentable
savings are in the tens of millions of dollars."
And competition means better service. "Our mainframe is long gone--we're
running everything it takes to run a retail business on Unix systems,"
says Mike Prince, director of information services for Burlington Coat Factory
Warehouse. "The fact that we can change vendors relatively easily means
our vendors are anxious to be our partners and to provide the kind of support
we need."
Why are businesses moving with confidence from their glass houses to
Unix systems? Because Unix is the only operating system that can rival the
security and reliability of mainframe systems, yet still offer the flexibility
of an open environment. No other operating system alternative can match
it--that's why Unix is the hands-down market leader in mainframe replacement.
"We needed more flexibility, more control, and more rapid response
to our changing business needs," says Hill about MCI's decision to
move its sales support functions from a mainframe to a Unix server. "Now
I'm in complete control. If there's a problem in any area, I can fix it
quickly, not ask someone else to do it for me, the way I needed to in the
mainframe environment."
"We didn't want to be in the business of maintaining code. We wanted
to take advantage of common, off-the-shelf software," says Jim McCann,
vice president of internal information services for Northrup Grumman Corp.,
which over the last two years has replaced its mainframe with Unix-based
business systems. "But these are applications that we run our business
on day-to-day. We chose Unix to run them. Nothing else came close to providing
the level of reliability we needed."
As organizations come down off centralized legacy systems, Unix offers the
best architecture for distributed computing. By using X Window System communications
and client/server protocols, you can decouple your desktop user interface
from your application, so all or part of the application can run on your
Unix server. That capability allows you to minimize investment in memory
and storage at each desktop, while still running very powerful applications.
By running applications centrally on Unix, you also eliminate desktop crashes
of the application, as well as the need for decentralized (and expensive)
support. X can run on multiple platforms, offering a complete range of choices
for your desktop operating environment.
Unlike some desktop-centric systems, Unix enables you to partition the operating
system, user interface, application, and database management system across
a flexible architecture of two, three, or even more tiers, taking advantage
of the capabilities of each platform in a customized fashion right for your
business.
Because Unix vendors have operated in an extremely competitive market, they
have developed the security, robustness, and ease of administration required
for replacing mainframes. "Our downtime has not increased at all,"
says Dennis Courtney, vice president of business reengineering at Dunlop
Tire Corp. Dunlop has moved critical applications such as payroll, purchasing,
accounts payable, and general ledger to Unix servers, and plans to replace
its mainframe entirely by 1997.
Another reason that Unix has become the operating system of choice for
distributed computing is its unrivaled scalability. Unix, in conjunction
with massively parallel processing architectures and/or symmetric multiprocessing
architectures, is at the heart of every interactive television trial in
the world--an application that quickly exceeds even terabytes of data. Compared
with this commercial application, most business applications will be managed
by Unix with ease, at a price/performance point that far outdoes any other
alternative. In addition, Unix companies were the first to have 64-bit computing,
and their operating systems will lead the way into this advanced next generation
of processing power.
"We were going to require a great deal of scalability in what we chose,"
says MCI's Hill, who is currently implementing a sales system that will
support 5,000 simultaneous users on a single Unix server. "We were
not comfortable that any alternative to Unix would scale up to support all
5,000 users. With Unix, we were very comfortable."
"We close 25 percent of all checks cleared in the U.S.," says
Tsvi Gal, senior vice president of information technology for Bank of America.
"For the volume of computing that Bank of America requires, no other
operating system can scale as well. Unix is the name of the game in non-mainframe-oriented
computing."
What's more, as well as being highly scalable, fault-tolerant Unix clusters
offer mainframe-class reliability. And as departmental networks increasingly
are used as gateways to wide-area networks and the Internet, Unix becomes
the most secure choice for even small installations.
Unix runs on more hardware platforms than any other operating system: from
hand-held devices to supercomputers, on all flavors of CPU. Companies are
able to take advantage of that scalability by choosing the best applications
for their needs, by making downsizing a reality, and by deploying the best
hardware architectures for their business.
Arnie Schapiro, director of information systems at Orchard Supply Hardware
Stores, became a believer in open systems after his supplier of proprietary
point-of-sale equipment announced that it would discontinue support. "After
that, I was sold on the advantages of open systems," he says. "With
Unix, we have freedom of choice and aren't locked into one supplier any
more."
In addition to freedom of choice, Schapiro also wanted to make use of Unix's
advanced networking. "Unix network utilities made our network easy
to administer," he says. "The utilities that come with Unix aren't
there with other operating systems."
It's no accident that Unix provides the richest networking capabilities
or that Unix is the preferred environment for companies interested in seamlessly
connecting systems and networks. From the beginning, the Unix community
has been defined by its commitment to interoperability, a commitment that
has made Unix the launch point for all significant enterprise network technologies
in the last 20 years. Here's a short list of contributions from the Unix
community that have become industry standards and make interoperability
a reality for users:
TCP/IP
It's easy to forget that network interoperability used to be impossible
unless you bought everything from a single vendor. Unix was the first operating
system with which users could take a computer out of a box and, without
worrying about its architecture or hardware configuration, plug it into
an Ethernet network and have it communicate immediately with other devices.
When given the choice, users overwhelmingly choose the open systems alternative
over proprietary network solutions. That's why TCP/IP, designed and adopted
as the Internet communications protocol in 1983, has become the glue that
holds enterprise systems together. It has played an indispensable role in
the Internet's dramatic growth. And that's why purveyors of single-vendor
solutions have begun to ship their products with TCP/IP stacks.
The X Window System
In keeping with the commitment to choice, the Unix community has acknowledged,
through its shared development work, users' freedom to choose other operating
systems when appropriate. For example, using X, a sophisticated windowing
system developed and overseen by a nonprofit, vendor-neutral consortium,
you can easily connect diverse laptops, terminals, and desktop computers
to Unix servers, making network-wide interoperability a reality.
SNMP and SMTP
The Unix community has recognized that, if distributed networks are going
to succeed, users will need a simple way to manage these networks from a
central location, as well as a simple way to communicate via electronic
mail across diverse networks. The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
and Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), spearheaded by the Unix community,
provide solutions that have become industry standards.
C and C++
The Unix community embraced these common development languages as a way
to assure interoperability among different kinds of computers; these languages
have since become standard environments for other operating systems. User
benefits include faster application development, easily portable applications,
and reduced development costs.
The World-Wide Web
Originally developed by the Unix community, this graphical Internet environment
has been extended to other operating systems and has become one of the most
successful and most rapidly deployed network communications tools ever created.
With its tradition of open, shared development, Unix has become the core
environment for new network and interoperability advances. As these advances
are accepted in the market, vendors of all stripes feel compelled to provide
at least a gateway to the open alternative. The open solution then becomes
the common language for the enterprise network and beyond. Because of open
systems, at last you have the power to demand--and receive--interoperability
among diverse systems.
In the past, the Unix community has been criticized by analysts and users
alike for not providing a single set of standards for all Unix operating
systems. But standards bodies fail whenever they attempt to rein in competitive
forces and whenever they attempt to define for users what your needs should
be. Standards should not be used to build the car, only to give us the rules
of the road. If vendors were forced to conform fully to a single standard
rather than be allowed to differentiate their product, users would suffer--Unix
would become, in essence, as limited as any single-vendor product.
The real goal of Unix standards bodies is to define for users and vendors
what a baseline, commodity Unix operating system should look like. Standards
assure you that Unix systems are interoperable and that applications are
readily portable. But they also allow for the innovation and technical excellence
that a competitive, open development environment brings.
Unix systems already offer more interoperability and portability than any
other operating system environment. Common networking and systems management
protocols allow you to mix and match multiple Unix systems with ease. Porting
applications from one Unix flavor to another takes a matter of days, rather
than the months or years it takes to rewrite code from one completely different
operating environment to another.
And the Unix industry is moving forward rapidly to make interoperability
and portability even easier for you. The Single Unix Specification, administered
by the vendor-neutral X/Open Co. Ltd. and formerly known as Spec 1170 for
the number of application programming interfaces it includes, defines for
operating systems vendors and application developers alike what commodity
Unix is. The X/Open Unix Brand is the buyer's guarantee that a supplier's
product conforms to the Single Unix specification. Today, 22 products from
16 suppliers carry the X/Open Unix Brand of compliance.
By developing or buying applications that take advantage of the interfaces
in the Single Unix Specification, you are guaranteed seamless portability
from one operating system to another. But the Single Unix Specification
does not mean that you must buy low-level standardized products. Purchasing
systems and applications that utilize the Single Unix Specification not
only provides you with portable, interoperable products but allows you to
take advantage of many feature-rich extensions offered by the various Unix
suppliers. You gain access to the latest technology within a standards-conforming
environment where vendors can successfully differentiate their products.
In short, state-of-the-art technology can and does sit on top of the space
in which products comply with the Single Unix Specification.
In this manner, the Unix industry again offers you the power to choose.
And because of this industry's thriving community of shared development,
even standards-compliant Unix will continue to outstrip the innovations
introduced in single-vendor markets.
One operating system has made distributed computing a reality. One operating
system is making new forms of interactive entertainment a reality and is
leading the way in new engineering and business applications.
That's Unix.
But Unix is more than all those things. Mostly, Unix is about giving you
the freedom to choose the best applications and development environments,
the best networking alternatives, the best hardware to meet your business
needs. Unix gives you the choice of when to upgrade your systems, or even
when to change your mind and install new solutions with a minimum of pain,
should your business demand it.
The Unix industry is dedicated to keeping the power of choice where it belongs:
with you, the user.
Figure 1: Unix and Overall Multiuser Markets, 1994
| Total multiuser systems | Unix | all operating systems |
| Units | 83,962 | 153,551 |
| Growth rate/units | 17.6% | 7% |
| Value | $6.3 billion | $19.7 billion |
| Growth rate/value | 23.5% | -8.6% |
"We win, because we are able to choose the best solution available
in the market."
Hugh Brownstone,
Vice President Of New Business Development,
IMS America, Ltd.
"For the volume of computing that Bank of America requires, no other
operating system can scale as well."
Tsvi Gal,
Senior Vice President Of Information Technology,
Bank of America
UniForum Corporate Sponsors are vendor and end-user organizations that support
the mission of UniForum and actively participate in its programs.
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