Rationale

At present, Indian government and education sectors are already adopting Linux on a major scale. Indian government and public sector organizations are looking at free open source applications as an alternate solution to reduce the dependencies on closed source, single vendor software products. Indian businesses are also testing Linux adoption by deploying Linux in a controlled/piloted manner.

This will force a unique situation in India, where the hybrid deployment of both Linux and Microsoft windows coexisting on desktop becomes the norm. The current LINUX desktops are primarily built for consumer desktop market in mind and lack centralized administration tools. The present Linux desktop administration is large extent not standardized with lot of repetitive, time-consuming, cumbersome manual tasks. The current deployment model would become a major limiting factor for large scale enterprise level LINUX desktop adoption, especially in scenarios where infrastructure services closely linked to user and computer administration are centrally provided.

The release of Samba 4.0 presents a unique opportunity for a centralized, single point, integrated solution based on Linux to manage both LINUX and Windows desktop deployments. Currently, no player in the market provides a single solution that manages the hybrid deployment of Linux and Windows.