Number crunching

IDC: Linux spending set to boom by 21 percent in 2009

Most vendors are already preparing for a tough Christmas.

Those selling Linux-based solutions, however, can expect to spread plenty of holiday cheer, according to a new report from IDC, "The Opportunity for Linux in a New Economy." (PDF)

Even as Red Hat recently talked up its impressive quarterly results, it's important to recognize that not all of Linux's success can be seen in corporate financial results. Much of the benefits of Linux comes from unpaid deployments, which continue to account for a healthy margin of total deployments:

Of course, as noted, there remains plenty of revenue … Read more

CIOs committing more to Red Hat, open source

Like begets like, and in the software world, open-source purchasing begets even more open-source purchases.

At least, that's the lesson I take from a recent Piper Jaffray report that suggests JBoss customers plan to invest heavily in Red Hat technology.

Not only are JBoss customers more likely to buy deeply into Red Hat, which is not surprising (though for Red Hat, it must be gratifying), but they're also more likely to buy MySQL and less likely to buy from Microsoft.

This can't be good news for Microsoft, and it probably is one reason the company has become so aggressive with its intellectual-property portfolio. … Read more

Google and Apple should join the Firefox party

In the past two years, Microsoft's Internet Explorer has bled 12 percentage points in market share, from 78.28 percent to 66.82 percent, according to data from Net Applications, while the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser has leaped nearly 7 percentage points, from 15.49 percent to 22.05 percent. Meanwhile, Apple's Safari has nearly doubled its market share, to 8.23 percent, and Google's Chrome has grown to 1.23 percent.

Microsoft can't be happy.

As I wrote last week, the more browser market share Microsoft loses, the easier it becomes for it to also … Read more

Forrester: Lots of room for open-source growth

Recent survey data compiled by Forrester Consulting on behalf of information systems specialist Bull suggests that we're at the front end of a long cycle of open-source infrastructure and application adoption.

That's right. Despite Gartner finding that 85 percent of enterprises have already adopted open source and Forrester Research's consulting arm finding that 45 percent of all companies that are using open-source software use it for mission-critical applications, the adoption appears to be somewhat thin, leaving a great deal of room for even more adoption, especially in open-source applications:

Huge swaths of the market have apparently adopted … Read more

MIT OpenCourseWare: Teaching the world for free

By any measure, MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative, which seeks to "open source" education by making course ware from premier institutions available online to all for free, is a success.

But recently published data for OpenCourseWare suggests that it's an even bigger success than I had supposed. Consider:

More than 53.7 million individuals have now visited OpenCourseWare's site/affiliated sites; OpenCourseWare servers have now delivered over 3.1 billion files ("hits") since launch; 8.5 million zip files of full course content have been downloaded from the site; 2.1 million OpenCourseWare videos have … Read more

Linux a recession winner, IDC finds

Linux long ago became the "furniture" of open source: essential infrastructure to most of the Fortune 500 and somewhat mundane in its predictable, ever-increasing adoption.

Despite its impressive rise, however, Linux still has a long, long way to go. While results of an IDC survey published this week found that 55 percent of the 300 IT executives surveyed already had Linux systems in use, a full 97 percent were running Windows.

Linux, in other words, still has a long way to go to reach full adoption and, importantly, the vendors that sell it have even further to go … Read more

Does OpenOffice have 11 million active U.S. users?

While Microsoft Office is actively used by roughly 50 percent of U.S. Internet users, according to a 2,400-strong survey administered by ClickStream Technologies, 5 percent of U.S. Web users also actively use the open-source productivity suite OpenOffice.org.

Importantly, ClickStream wasn't measuring installations. It was measuring use. The company actually installed client-side software that tracked which applications the users were running. To have OpenOffice in use across 5 percent of U.S. Internet users is pretty amazing.

How many people does this translate into? According to recent data, there are 303 million people living in the … Read more

Goldman Sachs sees IT spending dropping by 9 percent

As late as November 2008, Goldman Sachs was projecting a 4 percent decline in global IT spending, and a 5 percent drop in developed economies.

What a difference a few months make. On Monday, Goldman Sachs released an update to its "IT Spending Survey" report, and now projects a 9 percent decline in global IT spending, and a 12 percent decline in developed economies.

Goldman Sachs projects a more optimistic 1 percent decline in 2010 global IT spending, but given how quickly it has had to revise downward its 2009 projections, it wouldn't be wise to budget … Read more

How Zimbra tops Google's Gmail

Updated at bottom with some clarifications.

It's impressive to be able to give away 31.2 million free Gmail accounts, as Google has. It's even more impressive to get customers to pay for 40 million mailboxes, as Zimbra reported today, representing a sharp spike from the 20 million paid mailboxes reported in early 2009.

The secret to Zimbra's success? Innovation and integration, in part. While Google Maps has found its way into a range of different applications, Zimbra leads Gmail in mash-ups (called "Zimlets" in Zimbra parlance). My company is a Zimbra customer, and one … Read more