HP Sees Big Bucks in Linux

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Who said you can’t make money by supporting free community-based Linux
distributions?

HP is making $25 million by supporting the free Debian
GNU/Linux distribution in what may ultimately turn out to be a challenge to
commercial distributions from Novell and Red Hat.

HP announced in August 2005 it would be offering support services for Debian, which has been one of the most popular and widest deployed community-based Linux distributions since its inception.GNU/Linux.

In fiscal 2006, $25 million in hardware sales in EMEA
(Europe, Middle East and Africa) were directly related to HP’s Debian
support.

“I was pretty shocked when I found out about this,” Jeffrey Wade, worldwide
marketing manager of open source and Linux at HP, said.

Wade noted that the sales figures were much greater than his own
expectations. Though HP announced support for Debian last August, it was only
in December that HP began to sell what it calls Debian care packs of
support services. Those care packs are bundled offerings of support from HP
for predetermined levels of service and response times.

“When we talked in August we said that we’d be introducing a phased
approach,” Wade explained. “We’re now in phase four of our hardware testing, and
we’ll be finished by the end of this quarter and then we’ll have all
ProLiant and Blade System Servers supported by Debian.”

HP support is set for the Debian Sarge release, which debuted in June 2005. Wade noted that HP is working toward certifying its hardware against the upcoming Debian Etch release, which is set for a 2007 rollout.

Wade was unable to break out figures beyond EMEA, though he noted the bulk of
the Debian-related sales were to SMBs and government customers.

“We’re the first major vendor to offer this kind of support for Debian,”
Wade said, adding that, by backing it, the company is validating it as an alternative to commercially branded Linux distributions for customers.

HP supports both Novell SUSE Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Though HP
may well make more profit from a Debian-related sale since Debian is free
and does not involve additional subscription fees from a third party.

“We’re able to offer a better value, and we can make a little bit more margin
on it too,” Wade said.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.