Unisys Sets LinuxWorld on Fire--Literally

Published: April 11, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is safe to say that server maker Unisys was dragged by market forces into the Linux market. For years and years, Unisys was the poster child for Windows in the data center, and had been talking up how the move from Unix to Windows using its ES7000 Xeon and Itanium servers made the most sense for Unix shops. In August 2004, the company finally gave in and said that it would have a dual operating system model, supporting both Linux and Windows on its gear.

Since that time, Unisys has been a welcomed guest at LinuxWorld, but after last week, the people behind LinuxWorld might be asking Unisys to certify its booth with a third-party electrician. After the keynote address on Tuesday, when Nicholas Negroponte talked about his One Child Per Laptop effort (more on that next week), we all shuffled down to the expo floor to do our interviews, and at one point, we all started to smell smoke and then the huge fans on the Boston Convention Center roof kicked in because some component of the Unisys booth was on fire. Unisys took a lot of razzing from the crowd all day about "setting LinuxWorld on fire."

This is something that Unisys wished it had done metaphorically, to be sure. If Unisys hadn't bet solely on Windows with the ES7000s, and had expanded out to Unix and Linux, it might not have had to ink a deal to essentially co-develop and co-market high-end servers with Japanese server maker NEC instead of doing it alone. Hindsight and taking money from Microsoft to do promotion of your platform is easy; predicting the lateness of Windows 2000 Datacenter Edition, the rise of Linux in the data center, and the persistence of Unix in the data center--not so easy.