Linux opportunity buried in Unix market share data

Last week, IBM announced that over the past 10 years, it has gone from also-ran to first place in the Unix server market, claiming 35 percent of the $61 billion market in 2008 to Sun's 29 percent share, as noted in the Post-Bulletin.

Good for IBM, but the real news in this Unix market share carve-up isn't Unix at all: it's Linux.

Linux server growth has been outpacing Unix server growth for some time, with Linux gaining more than a full percentage point of market share to land at 13.4 percent market share earlier this year, according to IDC.

As more and more enterprises switch from Unix to Linux to gain performance and shed costs, Red Hat and Novell stand to gain.

For those wondering how big Red Hat and Novell can become on operating-system revenue alone, keep that $61 billion number in mind. Most of that $61 billion is hardware-related, but it meant approximately $650 million in Linux server sales for Red Hat and Novell over the past year. As Linux eats into Unix, Red Hat and Novell can expect to grow linearly with it.

Or perhaps they can do better. As the operating system comes to include big-ticket items like virtualization, perhaps the roughly 1 percent of the overall server market that Red Hat and Novell claim in software revenue will become 2 percent...or more.

This is the big opportunity. It's a good time to be selling Linux server-related software subscriptions.

[Mr. Dee]

Don't forget that Windows Server will be picking some of that low hanging fruit too (UNIX). As a lot of Enterprises look to reduce cost by moving to x86, proven technologies with a strong support and a knowledge IT workforce in Windows will help spur growth of Windows over the next few years and UNIX deployments decline. With both SUN and IBM selling x86 hardware, CIO's will be evaluating their best options, lowering TCO's. SUN being a OEM that also supports Windows Server, its definitely smart choice when the topic comes up.

[Dalkorian]

Proprietary lock-in doesn't save you anything, it only causes headaches.

[The_Decider]

No one with a clue uses anything from MS in the server room.

Lock-in costs lots of extra money.

[Waam]

Actually, as our company (I won't disclose our campany name) has grown from one site to 3 sites, 4 years ago we have dropped Windows server, and now have gone with Sun Solaris, and I don't think there is any turning back. Thinking about that low hanging fruit is good too for marketshare, but I think we were that low hanging fruit that upgraded, and needed something more. It was between finding something more advanced and powerful for Windows (which we couldn't), or an IBM solution, or Sun, and we just went with Oracle on Sun. Seemed to be the tightest integration for our needs, and I don't think our company can ever outgrow their business solutions in my lifetime.

[The_Decider]

This is why it would be great if HP picked up Red Hat.