The Tao Of Linux

Free of the hustle of the daily work life, Nat Friedman meditated in a Californian Buddhist monastery, clearing his mind of worldly clutter. For 10 days, he opened his consciousness to new ideas, new ways of thinking and new realms of possibility. No code. No e-mails. No meetings. No deadlines or work orders. Just simple serenity.

"Buddha was essentially a brain-hacker," Friedman says. "He developed techniques for manipulating the human mind, ways of creating happiness and removing worries."

The computer prodigy, who is still not even 30 years old and was recently promoted to the title of chief technology and strategy officer for open source at Novell, may have done the same kind of Buddhist mind-cleansing for the Linux world.

Friedman is the man behind SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10, the first practical graphical interface and integrated application for the popular open-source operating system. His creation has revolutionized the Linux OS with the look and feel of the familiar Windows environment.

For his vision and effort in creating SLED and bringing it to the channel, VARBusiness honors Friedman with its first-ever Technologist of the Year award. He tops a field of nearly 100 highly qualified nominees and the top 10 finalists who advanced the state of the art and pushed the bounds of innovation.

In addition to Friedman, VARBusiness honored vendor innovations in 13 technology categories, as well as an Innovative Company of the Year award. Each of the winners is profiled in the following pages. This was the most intense competition in the four-year history of the Tech Innovators Awards, with nearly 850 product nominations from more than 300 vendors.

A humble Friedman was surprised by the honor. At XChange Tech Innovators in Huntington Beach, Calif., he remarked how he was just having fun building an application that could open the Linux world to the masses.

NEXT: What Friedman was doing when his pals were watching Sesame Street.

From a very young age, Friedman had all the markings of a top technologist. He started programming at age 5 on an Apple IIe when he was hooked on making a "computer to do what you wanted it to do." By the time he was 10, he had learned several different programming languages--Basic, Pascal and C. And at 14, he and a friend launched a software company, C-Soft, a maker of utility software and games.

In 1993, he discovered Linux and it changed the course of his life. He rode his bike to the University of Virginia, close to where he grew up, to download the source code and kernel. In no time, he had Linux terminals sprinkled around his family's home, networked together with spliced serial phone cables. He even networked a Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator.

"There was all this creative energy with Linux," Friedman says. "There were tools and games and a full development environment that came with the operating system. None of this came with Windows."

During summer vacations in high school and college, Friedman worked at various software companies--Red Hat, Microsoft and AOL. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and majored in computer science, but says, "Supposedly I was working on my degree, but mostly I spent time online meeting people from the Linux world." His last final was for a Roman History class, but he left early to fly to North Carolina for a Linux conference to announce the launch of his next company, Ximian, which focused on open-source solutions.

Desktops Are Hard

Linux and its older Unix cousin are the darlings of the back office. Commercial adoption of open source took root in the data center first, where it performs brilliantly as a server operating system. Building a Linux server is easy, Friedman says; building a user-friendly Linux desktop? Now, that's hard.

"The server was already taking off and Red Hat had gone public. People were really showing an interest in a Linux server," Friedman says. "In a company where for every server there are 25 or 50 desktops, to make Linux successful on the desktop would have a big impact. It would be harder to be successful, though, because the desktop does more and it's more complicated. Ultimately, we had to make software that would be usable."

Friedman and business partner Miguel de Icaza set out to build a better Linux desktop. For power users, most conventional Linux distributions are fine. For the average user, however, Linux presents a daunting challenge reminiscent of the early days of MS-DOS. Building a GUI similar to Microsoft's Windows and Apple's Mac OS would broaden Linux's power.

Friedman and de Icaza produced a rudimentary application called Ximian Desktop, a suite of open-source applications integrated with the Linux OS. It was the foundation for the future. Then Novell came knocking, acquiring Ximian in 2003. A month after the deal closed, Friedman--in his mid-20s--stood before the Novell board of directors, advising them to buy SuSE Linux.

"We had all the pieces put together--all of the talent. So we got together and spent the last couple of years building SLED desktop; it's our crowning achievement," Friedman says.

NEXT: Thinking beyond the operating system.

But making a better operating system wasn't the only goal; Friedman and his team wanted a desktop that people would use. At Novell's usability labs, people with no Linux experience were asked to perform simple tasks on the Linux desktop.

"If people can't use it, they won't. So we learned a lot about usability," Friedman says. "Research shows that if you ask five or six people to do a task and you record the outcome, you learn how well the software will do at that task."

The result of that work is nothing short of remarkable: a 3D desktop that integrates the functionality of a GUI-based OS with practical business-productivity applications--word processor, spreadsheet, slide presentations. And it's compatible with the Windows world. In fact, SLED beat Microsoft Vista to market with many innovative features, including integrated search and multiple desktop views. Best of all, SLED and its supporting applications cost only $50 per seat.

"The opportunity for channel partners lies in their ability to offer choices to their customers and viable alternatives to some of the imposing licensing and proprietary software on the market," says Ladd Timpson, Novell's worldwide director of channel marketing. Although he emphasizes that he doesn't see the proprietary world going away anytime soon, he says a mixed-source environment is crucial.

In fact, Novell and Microsoft recently announced that they will officially be collaborating to help Microsoft and Novell products work together better. As part of the agreement, Microsoft says it will recommend the server version of SuSE Linux Enterprise for customers interested in Linux solutions.

And SLED is resonating with Novell partners, who are embracing it and recommending it to their customers.

"The product works; it's solid and it runs fast," says Frank Basanta, director of technology at New York-based Systems Solutions. "For companies looking to make the jump to a Linux environment and looking for a solid desktop, you can't go wrong at $50 per desktop."

Strategic Thinking

Now a CTO, Friedman spends most of his days talking with Novell partners and furthering the company's open-source strategy.

Friedman's vision and skills are now irreversibly embedded in Novell's resurgence as an IT powerhouse. While he has no illusions of knocking Microsoft out of its dominant spot in the desktop arena, he knows SLED is the foundation for a broader Linux future that's open to the masses. And it's a vision backed by a technology that VARBusiness believes merits celebration.

NEXT: Finalists for the Technologist of the Year Award.

VARBusiness received nearly 100 nominees for its Technologist of the Year designation, and it was a challenge to narrow the list to three finalists. In the end, the VARBusiness editors chose the following as additional standouts:

SWEN ANDERSON, CTO, Access Product Division, Raritan
Developed the first single-chip Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) with KVM/IP and Virtual Media support.

JOHN BEAM, Director of R&D Cooling Solutions, American Power Conversion (APC)
Developed the InRow Cooling product, which is capable of 30 kilowatts per rack with redundancy.

JOHN GMUENDER, CTO and VP of Engineering, SonicWall
Developed a security and data-protection suite based on interaction with and feedback from VARs.

PHIL HESTER, CTO and SVP, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
Oversaw AMD's strategy for tech development and entering new markets. Was key in the release of new chip products for OEMs and whitebox builders.

MICHAEL HICHWA, VP of Software Development for Server Technologies, Oracle
Managed the release of three products--Application Express, SQL Developer and the user interface for Oracle Database 10g Express Edition--that make the Oracle database significantly easier and more productive for the database developer.

TOM KNIGHT, VP and GM of Embedded Systems and Digital Office Products, Lexmark
Developed unique, customizable user interface for line of multifunction printers.

SAJAI KRISHNAN, GM, StoreVault Division
Launched the StoreVault S500, the first all-in-one storage appliance purpose-built for SMBs.

BILL McCLURE, VP of Development for Velocity Series Portfolio, UGS
Developed UGS Velocity Series, a portfolio of preconfigured design and data-management solutions specifically for SMB customers via the channel.

THAO NGUYGEN, Research Director for SMB, IBM
Rolled out a new Web-based contract technology, Contracts OnLine, to IBM's channel partners and SMB customers.