IBM Backs Firefox In-House

An anonymous reader wrote in with the link to a CNet story describing IBM's adoption of the Firefox browser for internal use. From the article: "Firefox is already used by about 10 percent of IBM's staff, or about 30,000 people. Starting this past Friday, IBM workers could download the browser from internal servers and get support from the company's help desk staff. IBM's commitment to Firefox is among its most prominent votes of confidence from a large corporation."

Surprising no one...

[Heliologue]

...since IBM has tradition been a huge advocate of open source.

Good reference case

[nokiator]

This may be the best possible reference case for the average IT guy trying to convince his/her boss that FireFox is a good solution for a corporate environment.

Good example?

[Sv-Manowar]

Having IBM as a good example to use when pushing for corporate adoption of Firefox is a great thing for people working in this area. Although, it must be said that IBM are less likely to have troublesome components (IE specific webpages, ActiveX components) within any intranet pages than other companies due to their own products in that area (I'm thinking Lotus..).

Support?

[Telastyn]

I know the whole "officially supported" practice, but really, it's a damned web browser. Certainly the biggest software services company can find a few people that know how that works...

Get Use To It Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

No matter what one thinks of IBM and its products, they are creating the blueprints companies around the world are using to get themselves out from mess they've all put themselves into with costly Microsoft products.

The headline isn't IBM back Firebox, but IBM shows the commercial world the way out of the quagmire of Microsoft dependance.

Its only natural

[FidelCatsro]

With IBMs large scale support for OSS , and its moves to replace the windows desktops with linux not to mention its sale of the PC business , Its only natural that they would move people on to an open browser.
What will be intresting to see is if this has a knock on effect to other large corperation as IBM is still very very influential.

This more than anything could be the break firefox needs toward wide scale acceptance beyond the 10% .Acceptance in the corperate market would mean a great deal of people will be using firefox at work , which would perhaps have the knock on effect of them using it at home .

When firefox has more than 30% of the market perhaps then we could relax in the knowlidge that most sites would then see fit to not specialise their code for IE .

Re:Dependence on rival's product?

[LWATCDR]

How.
1. Buy using Firefox IBM will require all web based apps the company develops or uses to be browser neutral. These means that Microsoft's IE only solutions are not an option.
2. Firefox runs on Linux and Mac as well as Windows. Since all web based apps can now run on Firefox they can also run on Linux and Mac.

Re:Surprising no one...

[hbo]

The truth is somewhere between "tradition" and "today's passing greed based fad." IBM believes that the basic technology underlying IT will increasingly become a commodity. They feel that Free/Libre and Open Source Software is a major driver of this trend. They made a huge bet 10 years ago that services layered on top of commodity software would be where the growth would be in IT spending. Because the facts have continued to show they were right about this, they have continued to commit the company to courses of action consistent with this direction in the years since. Support by IBM for F/L OSS is completely consistent with this strategic view. Although this is not the same thing as signing on, for example, to Richard Stallman's ethical code, it isn't a flash in the pan, and it won't go away overnight.

Re:About time

[hab136]

I work at a major investment bank and just yesterday they decided to send a memo around saying that Firefox is not to be used. I wonder why that was? No, really does anyone have any suggestions.

Support is usually the reason cited. "We support this product, don't use any other ones because our help desk isn't trained on it."

When the proxy team at the bank I used to work for wanted to use Linux boxes instead of Solaris (self-supporting team) for 2x the speed and 1/3 the cost, we were told no. The decision maker was very pro-MS, had quite a lot of MSFT stock, and had recently been pitched by MS about anti-Linux. But we weren't allowed to use it for technical reasons. Really.

Nice remote managament

[Tyrell Hawthorne]

Hopefully, this might lead to IBM helping with developing good tools for remote management of Firefox. It would be very helpful for all the people having big deployments. If Firefox is to be ubiquitous, this is needed.

Re:And

[Nutria]

Hey, 10 years ago, when Win 3.11 and Win95 were the competition, being able to "rub your belly and pat your head at the sam time" was a big plus for OS/2.

Re:About time

[yabos]

That's because fixes aren't sensational enough. Every news site jumps at the chance to say "Firefox security hole!!!!" or "Apple widgets insecure!!!!" but they seem to forget to post about the fix which is usually pretty soon after the flaw is found.

Re:Dependence on rival's product?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Buy using Firefox IBM will require all web based apps the company develops or uses to be browser neutral."

Which, of course, they could have done at any time just by telling their people to do it. Perhaps their apps are already browser neutral.

"Since all web based apps can now run on Firefox they can also run on Linux and Mac."

But what about those poor Linux and Mac users outside of IBM who apparently can't view all those web apps that weren't designed for FireFox? Perhaps someday they'll be able to join their IE brothers and sisters and enjoy the full Internet experience.

Re:Support?

[davenpsm]

According to IBM's site http://www.ibm.com/ibm/us/ [ibm.com] they currently have 329,000 employees. With an organization that large you don't simply install a new application and hope for the best!

You are correct, it is just a web browser, but when Jack and Jill in accounting cannot figure out where their 'Favorites' list went to and call the help desk, help desk staff need to know the answers. Granted, that is a simple question to answer, but think of the 100 other things that might be different between Firefox and IE (common message text for browser warning dialogs, etc), with 329K employees, even if only a small fraction of them run into questions it can mean time wasted by both the employee asking the question and the help desk person trying to find the answer. That time adds up quickly.

In any case, I see this as a huge success for Firefox!

Re:About time

[Saeger]

MSFT being in the DOW 30, and the bankers being old establishment-types might be a large part of the reason. The recent potential exploits in the news that made Firefox look 2% as bad as IE was enough justification to ban the 'commie' software.

Re:Get Use To It Microsoft

[poopdeville]

Well, IBM doesn't need MS, since they don't make personal computers anymore. I'm sure IBM appreciates this XBox business, but they only have a limited capacity to manufacture processors. And they're going to be really busy when they begin mass producing the Cell, the new powerpc, etc.

Re:Good reference case

[supabeast!]

Actually, this isn't a good test case for the average IT guy, because IBM is far from an average corporate environment. IBM is a technical company specializing in high-end server hardware and enterprise network consulting, so it's a safe assumption that the majority of IBMs employees are much more computer literate than the average corporate worker.

A better test case would be an insurance company, human-resources outsourcing firm, or a large bank. In on of those the employees not likely to be very computer literate, but they are computer-dependent and likely to do a lot of work via a browser, interacting with remote systems via a web interface.

Re:More companies should follow suit ...

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

It's not flamebait, it's a legitimate question.

How will IBM effect Firefox? - How will IBM implement their Firefox rollout?
How will IBM affect Firefox? - How will Firefox be changed because of the relationship?

Corprate Managment

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox will really start to hit the enteprise when you can manage it through Group Policies and deploying it though AD.

Thats what's holding me back on pushing it out to our Windows desktops