Indian Companies Embracing Linux Faster Than Ever

cpatil writes "CNBC-TV 18 India has just announced that India's largest Insurance company, LIC(Life Insurance Corporation of India) sealed a deal with Red Hat to use its desktop and server software. LIC has roughly 160 Million customers, making it a non-trivial deal. Leslie D'Monte over at rediff also has a closer look at Linux deployment in India."

KDE offers better Tamil, Hindi and Urdu support

[Anonymous Coward]

As an Indian, I am quite surprised that they went with an offering from Red Hat. Red Hat has long been known to support GNOME as their main desktop. However, KDE is the leader when it comes to supporting the popular Indic languages like Urdu, Tamil, Hindi, and Bengali.

I myself use the Tamil support of KDE, and have long found it superior to that of GNOME (even for recent releases). More of the core KDE applications have translations available, and most of are a higher quality than those of GNOME. That is not to say that GNOME is unable to support those languages; that is clearly not the case! The fact remains, however, that KDE is the better option at this time when it comes to displaying Indic scripts, and offering Indic translations.

blah blah and yeah

[atari2600]

The state-owned LIC (Life Insurance Corporation) is a big customer and a major player in India and has a major share of the market (with a few smaller players). In the last few years though, private companies have been eating into the share of LICs market.
From here [mindbranch.com]

"Though the total volume of LIC's business increased in the last fiscal year (2004-2005) compared to the previous one, its market share came down from 87.04 to 78.07%. The 14 private insurers increased their market share from about 13% to about 22% in a year's time. The figures for the first two months of the fiscal year 2005-06 also speak of the growing share of the private insurers. The share of LIC for this period has further come down to 75 percent, while the private players have grabbed over 24 percent."

So yeah this is a big deal (where the hell did you come up with "non-trivial"? - use of non-trivial because this is Indian stuff?) and this is offtopic, but rediff.com is a sucky site. Try control-clicking any of their links on their home-page (and say hello to popup central which beat Firefox).

Re:What about Windows?

[Lost my religion]

I am sure that you are right in a way - with computers becoming more accessible, Windows usage will also go up. However, I believe that Linux has the faster growth rate - just because it is free (as in beer).

To pull a statistic out of thin air, more than 95% desktops in the home user market use pirated versions of Windows. With the average incomes, it is simply not possible to buy software that is priced in USD. Windows costs more than what an average engineer makes in a month. The more educated folks are trying to move away from piracy, and Linux offers them a good option. Also, it being free (as in speech) gives people a reason to contribute to it.

I am glad that major corporations are moving to Linux - it just means better software for everyone as the benefits trickle down.

Number of customers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Citing the number of customers makes no sense. An insurance company doesn't equip each of its customers with a computer (and OS). What's much more relevant to Red Hat is the number of employees of the company that will be using their product. This number is probably in the tens of thousands, not hundreds of millions, assuming every employee gets a Linux desktop. (If it's just server machines, then the number of instances of the OS might be in the hundreds.)

No doubt the poster was motivated to wave a large number around, despite the lack of common sense.

Re:What about Windows?

[arvindn]

Not true. Speaking from first hand experience in both countries, linux usage in India is much higher than in America both in the home and office. There have been a number of genuine large-scale Windows-to-linux switches, as opposed to just talking about it or migrating a dozen servers in a corner somewhere. The average bank clerk (my mom included :-) is actually using linux terminals on a day-to-day basis.

LIC - India used Unix earlier

[betasam]

LIC India was one of the largest users of Unix (SUN Solaris) systems prior to this announcement. They had trained Unix sysadmins and tape backup systems in 1998. Long before such an official announcement was made many of the client machines connecting to the servers were being switched to Linux even at regional offices. This time Redhat is migrating the servers too to Linux. So that in a sense is the corporate world beginning to embrace Linux.

Adding to this, Reliance Infocomm Ltd., one of the largest CDMA service providers does provide a rather clumsy, yet workable tool for dialing-up internet using their phones. They try to address a small but existent Linux Desktop market. There are OEM PCs that ship with TurboLinux desktops in India from many manufacturers.

However, the largets ATM chains, SBI - State Bank of India (now on a week long strike) and several other institutions continue to use flavors of legacy old systems including Microsoft Win32 platforms. Home users are most uncomfortable switching to Linux despite the arrival of Ubuntu/Kubuntu and other easily configurable alternatives. There is still much to be done. The transition is slow but definitely happening in the market, and that's the good news.

As for outsourcing blah, that's irrelevant to the article. Service firms adopt platforms that can put them in business with their clientele. That's business sense and they keep doing it.

Your statistics are misleading.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with your statistics is that they're measuring very different things. Recall that GNOME and KDE are structured quite differently. KDE is a far tighter distribution system than GNOME.

Those statistics are for the very core of GNOME: GTK+, GLib, GDK, the GNOME desktop and taskbar, Metacity, and applications like gnome-terminal. It does not take into account GAIM, for instance, which is a separate project.

The stats for KDE, on the other hand, not only include the comparable base libraries and applications to that of GNOME, but also much software that for GNOME is completely separate. The data for KDE includes that for the Kopete instant messenging system, while the GNOME data does not include that for the equivalent in GAIM. The KDE data includes Konqueror, while the GNOME data does not include Galeon, Epiphany, Firefox, etc.

The amount translated for GNOME should be far more, just because the portion of software being measured is far less than that being measured by the KDE data. The numbers for GNOME start to decrease significantly once you start making the packages equal (by bringing in GAIM, Galeon, Nautilus, etc.)

Re:What about Windows?

[woobieman29]

95% eh? WRONG.

Sure there are a large number of pirated copies, but it's nowhere near 95%. Most likely the largest portion of Windows users are running whatever came installed on their Dell/Gateway/HP machine.

That's the problem with pulling statistics "out of thin air" - you run the risk of making a really silly statement.

Re:What about Windows?

[bain_online]

Windows users are running whatever came installed on their Dell/Gateway/HP machine.
You don't really get India mentality. Nobody (consumers atleast) buys dell/hp/gateway except for laptops. Most of the machines delivered at homes are hand assembled by local supplier who buys motherboards and other stuff in bulk. They have zero knowledge and just install pirated copies of windows to "test" the machine and deliver.
We at PLUG :- Pune Linux User Group (Pune is a mid size city in central india.) have very less resistance in installing linux on the PC's we find at our grasp as long as whatever software the person wanted the pc for is provided on linux. Games are the most problamatic feature of a standard windows pc however and we so far have no solution for it. Transgaming/wine are all ok but unfortunately they don't garuntee all the games on a "1500 games mania" dvd bought for under 500Rs (20USD) will run.

In related news

[slack_prad]

http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/apr/08spec.htm [rediff.com]

The UTI bank is glad they have linux running.

"Today, we are really happy with Linux that has delivered 99.99 per cent uptime so far," says Pritesh Thaker, AVP, IT, UTI Bank.

Wrong!

[eldacan]

If you cared to click the link you could have seen that for each language, you have both developer-libs and desktop percentages. For example:
Hindi [gnome.org]: dev 99.84%, desktop 93.39%
Tamil [gnome.org]: dev 73.38%, desktop 65.81%

Now clicking on 'desktop' for Tamil you have the details for each app. Indeed, GAIM is not in there because it's not an official GNOME app, but you do have Epiphany and Nautilus (the GNOME equivalents to Konqueror), or Ekiga (previously Gnome-Meeting), or Totem (movie player), ...

Of course the KDE stats don't take into account *all* apps written for KDE either...