CEO Ozzy Papic, whose Nitix OS provides a black box version with proprietary autonomic computing extensions to the standard Linux kernel. He claims his company has been able to crack the small business market with a bare bones server that makes Linux invisible as it performs email, web, file, and print serving.
Recently, the $20 million, 6-year old company released a new version of Nitix that adds an emulation environment, enabling applications and databases that run on standard Linux to also run on Nitix. The new product is called Nitix Application Edition.
Although Net Integration’s Nitix offerings have been very narrow so far, the company says it has managed to crack the Microsoft Small Business Server market with over 2000 resellers. Nitix’s claim to fame is its simplicity.
Comparing a Microsoft study on how long it took to set up an email server, Net Integration claims Nitix can be set up within minutes, compared to hours for Microsoft and Linux.
According to Papic, while small businesses have the same security, stability, vendor lock-in, and pricing issues with Microsoft as their larger counterparts, until now, Linux platform leaders like Red Hat and Novell/SuSE have not provided viable alternatives.
The hurdle has been that Linux requires UNIX-like skills that are foreign to most Windows shops. With Nitix, system admins don’t see Linux, but instead a visual environment that automates most of the configuration steps involved with setting up servers. And, taking advantage of Linux’s stability, it automates management, healing, and failover with proprietary autonomic capabilities.
There are other providers such as Aduva that deliver autonomic computing capabilities to regular Linux. However, Aduva’s focus, which extends IBM’s Tivoli Orchestrator to automatically redirect computer resources in response to spikes in business activity, is aimed more at the high end market which juggles large workloads over large compute farms that may number on the dozens of hundreds of Lintel (Linux on Intel) blades.
For Net Integration, the focus is on the small business that lacks expertise and wants a lower cost, more secure alternative to Windows.
Although the company claims that any Linux application could run on the new Application Edition without porting, it will open a certification and partner program with providers of small business packages such as AccPac.
