Asianux, a partnership between three Asian Linux vendors, is looking to expand its reach in Asia and hopes to add new members from Southeast Asia and India, executives said Friday.
Asianux currently has three members: China’s Red Flag Software Co. Ltd., Japan’s Miracle Linux Corp., and South Korea’s Haansoft Inc. These three companies jointly developed Asianux 2.0, a server version of the Linux operating system that was formally announced Friday in Beijing. Each of the partners offers Asianux 2.0 under its own brand name, such as Red Flag DC Server 5.0, for example. Asianux 2.0 — which is now available in English, Japanese, Korean and Chinese-language versions — offers several improvements over the first version of the software, which was developed by Red Flag and Miracle. In this release, the operating system adds support for 64-bit processors and offers improved performance and reliability, the group said.
The Asianux 2.0 launch in Beijing was attended by top executives from all three companies: Chris Zhao, the executive president of Red Flag; Daniel Cho, a director at Haansoft; and Takeshi Sato, president of Miracle.
With the release of Asianux 2.0 behind them, the three partners are now looking to take a bigger role in Asia’s Linux market. “We’ll expand our cooperation project to other Asian countries and to the world,” Cho said.
Asianux is currently looking for partners in India, Singapore and Malaysia, Zhao said. “We hope we can find some local partners in these countries,” he said, noting the group has already begun the process of evaluating several companies as potential partners.
Among the factors being taken into consideration, potential partners must be able to contribute development resources to the Asianux project, provide local language capabilities, and offer support for Asianux users in their home countries, Zhao said.
In addition to bringing in more partners, Asianux is looking to win more high-profile deals in Asia. Cho noted that Asianux 2.0 was recently selected for South Korea’s National Education Information System (NEIS) project, a system being developed to handle student records for 10,000 schools across the country.
Looking to the future, Cho said Asianux hoped the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, which recently mandated that its IT systems use open-source software, would adopt its version of the Linux operating system.
