Take Back Your Infrastructure

Open source forces you to get reacquainted with your IT infrastructure. It's the kit car of IT. You buy the frame and customize to your heart's content, putting, say, a Bentley grill on your VW Bug.

"Acceptance of open source depends on the CIO's personal style as much as anything," says Bob Wolf, operational director of the Strategy Practice Initiative for The Boston Consulting Group. If you don't like your people fiddling with stuff, he says, you will probably wait on open source until it's plug-and-play.

"You have to own open source," says Ed Wojciechowski, vice president and CIO of Menasha, a Neenah, Wis.-based packaging and plastic products manufacturer. Wojciechowski did what most CIOs would only consider doing as a contestant on Fear Factor : From 2000 to 2001, he switched his SAPSAP ERPERP system from Unix machines over to Linux on Intel servers. SAP had only just ported its applications over to Linux for public consumption during that time. Alles zu ERP auf CIO.de Alles zu SAP auf CIO.de

CIOs at Fortune 500 companies worry about moving their ERP applications over to Intel servers because they rely on huge databases that need lots of processing power. Unix workhorses can accommodate many more processors in each box than Intel servers running Windows or Linux. But the performance gap is narrowing, says Manfred Stein, product manager of LinuxLab and Unix Platforms for Walldorf, Germany-based SAP, the biggest ERP vendor. "The number of systems where Intel would not provide sufficient resources to run the database is very small, less than 1 percent of our installed base," he says. For that 1 percent, SAP is evaluating Oracle's RAC clustering system for Linux so that customers can simply add more Intel boxes as the databases grow, says Stein.

Wojciechowski had an ace up his sleeve for his SAP switchover: a brilliant college kid contributing code to the Linux kernel in his spare time. He started designing Wojciechowski's Linux ERP architecture as a part-time employee during the summer of 1999. Now he's out of college and working for Menasha full-time. Wojciechowski won't give his name, much less offer him up for an interview. "The whole world would come after him," he laughs.