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Linux still growing, the proof is in sales

Jeremy Matthews
By Jeremy Matthews, Head of Panda Security's African operations.
Johannesburg, 29 Nov 2000

Despite Linux being to all intents and purposes, a free operating system, confirmation of its growing popularity as an application server platform can be found in sales figures, according to Jeremy Matthews, MD of enterprise software and host system Web-enablement specialist, Dax Data.

"This was well illustrated when Allaire announced that, within six months of the release of the product, it had sold one thousand copies of ColdFusion 4.5 Server for Linux. This appears to indicate that, while devotees are happy to use standard open source tools for ordinary Web and email servers, some prefer ColdFusion when building and delivering e-commerce and enterprise systems for the Internet," he says.

Matthews contends that this phenomenon is proof positive that open source products can co-exist with the more traditional variety, citing value add as the primary criterion.

"ColdFusion runs natively on Unix and delivers enterprise features such as service-level fail-over, integration with Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and expanded XML support. This offers Linux customers the ability to achieve high availability and improved performance on large-scale applications as well as enhanced integration with new and existing enterprise business systems," he explains.

His point is supported by Infonautics, a provider of personalised information agents and Web sites that recently relaunched the Sports Sleuth Website (http://www.SportsSLEUTH.com). ColdFusion for Linux powers the site`s entire cluster of over 20 servers.

Chief technical officer of Infonautics, Ram Mohan, is reported to have said that the company selected ColdFusion for reasons of reliability, rapid development capabilities and scalability. Matthews confirms this: "During some of the SportsSLEUTH contests, ColdFusion on Linux is apparently called on to handle as many as 1.7 million page views per hour - a significant workload any way you look at it."

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Dax Data

Based in Cape Town with an office in Johannesburg, Dax Data has made a business of extending the useful life of legacy systems. A Microsoft Solution Provider and an IBM Business Partner, offers solutions for secure delivery of enterprise applications and information across organisational boundaries and the Internet. Dax Data holds a variety of exclusive distribution agreements for enterprise software and Web-enablement products from: NetManage; GraphOn; DataMirror; Tango/04; Allaire; Categoric; ASG Report.Web; BackSoft; and HiT.

Allaire

Allaire Corporation is a leading provider of Internet software products and services for companies building their businesses on the Web. Supported by a community of 450,000 developers and global network partners, the Allaire Business Platform enables tens of thousands of companies worldwide to seize new business opportunities by creating e-commerce content management, customer service and business automation systems. Headquartered in Newton, Mass., Allaire has offices in Europe and Asia Pacific and can be found on the World Wide Web at www.allaire.com.

ColdFusion is an U.S. registered trademark and Allaire, JRun, Allaire Spectra and HomeSite are trademarks of Allaire Corporation. All other company names, brand names and product names are trademarks of their respective holder(s).

Editorial contacts

Brian Bakker
PR Connections
(011) 885 3141
daxdata@pr.co.za
Jeremy Matthews
REMOVED(Dax Data)
(021) 683 3861
jmatthews@daxdata.co.za