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September 10, 2008 8:07 AM PDT

Survey: 96 percent of enterprises not deploying Ubuntu server

by Matt Asay
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Goldman Sachs September 2008 IT spending survey delivers a sobering blow to suggestions of the rise of Ubuntu:

The enterprise isn't seeing it yet.

I've seen indications of Ubuntu adoption within customer surveys that Alfresco and others have done, but this survey of 100 IT executives from a range of Fortune 1000 companies suggests that perhaps the Ubuntu revolution still has a ways to go to make it in the stodgy old enterprise.

Granted, with CIOs representing 48 percent of survey respondents, and vice presidents of IT representing another 33 percent, we're unlikely to get a very good view of grassroots IT adoption. Even so, I would have hoped to see more than 4 percent of respondents indicating that Ubuntu is being used within their enterprises, especially given its ever-increasing adoption:

Enterprise Linux Adoption: Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu

(Credit: Goldman Sachs)

On the glass half-full side, the fact that four percent of this crowd has even heard of Ubuntu...well, that shows progress. :-)

Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay.
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by The_Decider September 10, 2008 9:40 AM PDT
Ubuntu is just like Windows: a sub-standard "me-too" product.

Why go Ubuntu when there is RHEL and SLED?
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by Simplicius September 10, 2008 10:22 AM PDT
Why don't you say:

"4% of Enterprises deploying Ubuntu Server"

For a young and small company like Canonical this sounds quite a success.
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by rurik_bradbury September 10, 2008 11:51 AM PDT
I would bet the figure is more like 20-30%, when you include non-production systems -- but senior IT guys don't realize it. Perhaps the headline should be: "CIOs totally unaware of the software they use"?
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About The Open Road

Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to the Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

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