idc

Linux jumps to 13.4 percent of the stalling server market

According to a recent IDC report highlighted by ZDNet, Linux is booming. At just 9.4 percent of the overall server market in terms of revenue in 2007, Linux has now climbed to 13.4 percent of the overall server market, with Unix at 7.7 percent and Windows at 36.5 percent. If Linux server vendors want to continue to grow, at some point they're going to have to come to grips with Windows, rather than eating into the low-hanging Unix fruit.

The big winner in the quarter was IBM, with 33.2 percent of the market. Hewlett-Packard … Read more

Intel rolls while Rambus and MIPS reel

Being fabless isn't so hip these days.

Rambus and MIPS Technologies are both chip companies that don't have their own chip fabrication facilities. Intel does. Perhaps not coincidentally, Rambus and MIPS are restructuring, while Intel's business is coasting on top of surging processor shipments.

Both Rambus and MIPS, which make a living off licensing intellectual property for chips, announced layoffs this week. Intel, meanwhile, is selling lots of its tiny Atom processors and seeing processor shipments surge overall.

Rambus said Thursday that it will reduce its workforce by approximately 90 positions and will take a restructuring charge … Read more

IDC: Solid state drive, hard disk speed gap small

Dell will sell you a 128GB solid state drive for an unprecedented $649. But wait. An IDC report claims the performance gap between solid state drives and lower-cost high-performance hard disk drives is not that significant at the system level.

Solid state drives are attracting more scrutiny as they increase in capacity and decrease in price. (Dell's $649 drive is a radical price drop since many drives with half the capacity still sell for more than $700.)

Solid state drives (SSDs) are considered to be generally more power efficient, faster, and in some respects more reliable than hard disk … Read more

PC market laughs in the face of economic uncertainty

Despite concerns that a weakening U.S. economy would slow spending here and elsewhere, the PC market is chugging along respectably.

The market's success was foreshadowed Tuesday by Intel, whose solid quarter demonstrated that there's continued demand for notebook PCs particularly. Shipments of PCs worldwide grew 16 percent in the second quarter of this year, led by the Europe, Middle East, and Africa regions, according to IDC. Shipments were down in the Asia-Pacific region, usually a strong market for growth, but the results were even worse in the U.S., where units shipped grew 3.6 percent, according … Read more

Standalone OSS revenue to reach $4.83 billion by 2012

Matt Lawton, director of Open Source Software Business Strategies at IDC, sent me over some details from its latest report on Open Source. I have a few of the details below, and Matt really wanted me to remind everyone that open-source software is being used in so many more ways than straight standalone commercial product deployments and that the standalone $1.73 billion for 2007 is just one component.

The market for standalone open-source software (OSS) continues to be in a significant growth stage. This IDC study outlines the evolution of worldwide revenue from standalone OSS and presents IDC's … Read more

2008 a peak growth year for laptops, analysts say

Worldwide PC shipments are on pace to grow 15.2 percent in 2008, according to IDC. That's above the analyst firm's March prediction of 12.8 percent growth. But laptop shipments, which have become an increasing force in the PC market, will peak.

Shipments of portable PCs should grow 34.5 percent this year, according to a PC shipment tracker that IDC released this week. That's up from 33.9 percent in 2007 and way above the projected 13.4 percent for next year. By 2012, according to the firm, portables will increase by only 9 percent. … Read more

Forrester survey discovers that virtually no one uses open source (?!?)

Forrester just released a new survey, one that begs the question: Who paid for this rubbish?

I generally like Forrester's work, but this survey flies in the face of every piece of research on open source that I've seen in the last five years...including research from Forrester. Also, as the research itself finds, often its survey respondents are using open source even when they don't know it: Nearly half of those surveyed by Forrester who are using open-source frameworks (e.g., Spring) still claim they are not using open source.

Forrester's newest research finds:

Seventy percent of decision-makers responded that they don't have interest or have no plans to adopt open-source software; Only 23 percent of respondents said expanding their use of open-source software was a priority; Security is the main concern around adopting open-source software. Eighty-eight percent of respondents said it was an important or very important concern.

Amazing how open source's greatest strengths are now being used against it. Security? I'm not suggesting that open source is perfect here, but it's one of the primary reasons that people are dumping proprietary software for open source. This is a classic Microsoft spin, and directly contradicts Forrester's own, earlier research that open source offers security advantages, not disadvantages.

Fortunately, if CIOs care to spend even a nanosecond checking Forrester's claims about tepid adoption of open source, there is a wide array of contradictory evidence, including from Forrester:

Earlier this year, Gartner's Mark Driver noted the following: "By 2012, 80 percent or more of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology."… Read more

Apple's iPhone loses U.S. market share in Q1

Apple experienced a bit of a setback in the U.S. smartphone market during the first quarter after coming out of nowhere last year to rank among the top companies.

According to data compiled by IDC, Apple's still the second-leading smartphone maker in the U.S. behind Research in Motion and the BlackBerry franchise. But it lost market share going from the fourth quarter to the first at the expense of RIM and Palm, according to the figures provided by IDC analyst Ramon Llamas.

RIM's market share went from 35.1 percent in the fourth quarter to 44.… Read more

IT predictions and the sneaky rise of open source

Sometimes our beloved analysts get things dead-on...and sometimes their predictions as to where IT trends will take us are very, very off.

In an excellent article, ZDNet traces the non-demise of Windows and UNIX that analysts predicted, the continued dominance of Microsoft on the desktop (which was supposed to have been supplanted by open-source alternatives by now), and generally blisters our inability to predict the future with regard to open source. It's everywhere, yes, but without the expected dominance that was to come with ominpresence.

One thing it has brought us, however, and that is a significant shift in how all companies engage open source:

...[Apache, Firefox, and Samba] are token victories that mainly offer new options for home users and small businesses. No other open-source application has enjoyed anywhere near the massive commercial success of Linux through its creation of an entire services and support ecosystem.

Instead, they have served as game-changers - motivators to encourage for-profit vendors like IBM and Microsoft to up their game and offer extra value in their respective products.… Read more