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INDUSTRY WATCH: See Nitix Run
By David Rubinstein
 July 15, 2004 — One of our chief responsibilities as the newspaper of record for the software development industry is to cut through the marketing spiel of tools and platform vendors to give you, our readers, as objective a look as possible at what’s happening in the industry.
Recently, though, we learned of a campaign so fun that we feel compelled to mention it here. Oh, and the technology underlying the campaign is pretty cool, too.
The company is Net Integration Technologies Inc., and since its incorporation in 1999 it has been developing and selling Nitix, a Linux kernel-based operating system that sits in direct competition to Microsoft in the server market where small and midsized businesses shop.
Now, however, a new version of Nitix is coming out with enhanced autonomic computing features for self-installation and self-healing, as well as with “Uniconf,” which is a conduit through which a Nitix system can configure itself and also reach out to other systems to configure them. This is the story told by Ozzy Papic, the company’s founder and chief executive officer.
“We’re going for the next stage in the evolution of operating systems,” Papic said. “Everything’s getting way too complex. To run a little server room, you need to know rocket science.”
The company’s goal, Papic said, is to create a replacement for Microsoft’s server operating systems but not have users see any difference as they go about doing their jobs. Papic said he can envision a framework whereby Nitix becomes a glue to pull an enterprise’s disparate systems together, with the autonomic features flowing into other parts of the organization. The unified configuration feature for the first time takes Nitix from a self-contained operating system and gives it multiserver capability, Papic said.
“You can deploy any network on Nitix now, and it’s more transparent than Microsoft,” Papic added. “And, Nitix-powered servers can be plugged into a Windows environment. That saves a lot of money on the cost of the solution. The costs to run, install and maintain the system are orders of magnitude less.” Nitix, he claimed, is 20MB and is functionally equivalent to Microsoft Small Business Server in that it, too, features a SQL engine, does virus scanning and Web caching and has a firewall and e-mail, but it’s one-half of 1 percent of the size. And, he said, Nitix does more in the areas of disaster recovery and in virtual private networks, while never having been penetrated by or affected by any viruses, worms or other malicious attacks.
Net Integration Technologies had a big problem, though. As a small venture-funded company based in Canada, it struggled with getting people to understand what it was doing because it lacked the massive marketing budget that Microsoft has.
So a creative team that Papic called “very brave” came up with a concept, and the company’s advertising agency fleshed it out.
It’s called, “Sorry Bill.”
Written and drawn in the style of an elementary-school primer, “Sorry Bill” tells the story of a little boy with glasses named Bill who tries to impress a young girl with his wooden go-cart, but it keeps crashing unexpectedly and breaking down. Meanwhile, another boy drives up in a sleek cart and whisks the girl away while the young boy with glasses is left trying to effect repairs. Following the cute story are a few pages of text explaining what Nitix is and what it can do
The company decided on the use of the primer approach to show “that it’s as simple as child’s play,” Papic said, further boasting that a 500-person company can deploy a complete back-office infrastructure in half an hour.
Papic said the response to the campaign has been very good but concedes that Microsoft “owns” the market. At least now, companies looking to make a server platform buy can get a different read on the matter. An easy read.
David Rubinstein is editor of SD Times. |
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