LinuxWorld keynotes: Now is the time to invest.

If there was one solid message to come from the opening keynotes at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, it is this: Now is the time.

Illustrated through the lenses of two large, mainstream industries – financial services and health care – the first two presenters talked about ways that investments in new technology might help the bottom lines.

In the first presentation, Jeffrey Birnbaum, Managing Director and Chief Technology Architect for Merrill Lynch, kicked things off with a look at stateless computing, a poorly-worded phrase for a pretty smart idea. One of the biggest problems with existing approaches is the dedicated server network. Instead, companies should be shifting to a shared computing environment, one where the redundancy of installed files, applications and even operating systems is reduced.

Also see: IBM, Ubuntu, Novell and Red Hat gang up on Vista

Video: Picking a Linux distribution

LiMo vows to fight on, debuts new mobile handsets from Motorola, NEC, Panasonic

LiMo, dude, where's my Internet?

Remember: the operating system is no more than a piece of software. It just happens to be the first piece of software that loads when a computer boots. But why couldn’t any machine run any OS or any application that’s installed on the network – instead of the machine? In a way, this is a form of cloud computing – just within a private network, with access granted at various levels and everything housed in a single filing system.

Birnbaum made an interesting observation about capacity. He said 61 percent of total server capacity in the enterprise is pretty much unused. What businesses need to do is reduce the redundancy and find ways to utilize the unused capacity – a move that could significantly reduce expenses in computing infrastructure. Shared computing allows businesses to maximize their capacities, he said.

Health care is one of those industries that could benefit by the use of shared computing, said Randall Spratt, Chief Information Officer for McKesson. In his speech, he used a good analogy that was probably wasted on the 20-something crowd of techies in the audience (but one that I remember from my childhood days.)

Banks, he said, once utilized pass books – you went into your branch, deposited or withdrew money, and the teller stamped your book to reflect the transaction. There were no multi-bank ATM networks and there were no shared records even among branches of the same bank. Obviously, banking has changed and banks operate in a seamless, connected world today.

Health care is an industry that touches every person in this country – regardless of who they area, where they live or how much money (or insurance) they have. But health care, he said, is still working on the pass-book model. Today, when we meet with a new doctor or walk into a new facility, we fill out the same paper forms and answer the same questions about insurance, health history or allergies to certain medications, even though we’ve told countless doctors the same information many times before.

On the technology side, cash-strapped hospitals are still running software applications that were written 30 years ago (which explains the green-screen DOS-looking dumb terminals that you still see in many emergency rooms today). Many of the platforms that run those applications were invented 40 or 50 years ago. That’s not to say that newer and better applications and systems don’t exist. Hospitals just can’t afford them. But through a Linux strategy, those investments are becoming more affordable because they can be scaled for now and expanded later. Health care can get better if physicians, pharmacies and hospitals can share access to critical medical information.

Now is the time to invest – and Linux is a good approach, he said. He cited a few examples of hospitals large and small that have launched Linux strategies. Among them was a large hospital in Houston, which used a Linux approach to launch a disaster recovery system, one that would enable them to maintain care in crisis situations such as hurricanes.

Health care in this country is in poor shape today, a point where both presidential candidates agree, Spratt said. Now is the time for the health care industry to invest in Linux-based solutions as a way to save both lives and money.