Red Hat voted VAR's top server operating system

It's perhaps not surprising that Channel Insider recently named Red Hat as the industry's top server operating system. What is surprising is that Microsoft's Windows wasn't in the top-three vendors, with Sun and Novell coming in second and third place, respectively.

Perhaps Microsoft isn't as profitable for its partners as it has aimed to be?

Channel Insider polled an "elite group" of value-added resellers (VARs) to get the pulse on VARs' preferred technology, from server operating systems to business intelligence software, and everything in between. Looking at the other categories, Microsoft fared well:

Microsoft claimed the top spot in the "Client Operating System" category. The Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 also won in the "System and Network Management" category. And Microsoft's SQL Server won in the "Database" category.

So, this isn't a group of Microsoft haters doing the voting. This a group of companies that undoubtedly makes a lot of money selling Microsoft products.

Even so, in one of the industry's most critical categories - servers - VARs are apparently hot on Linux/UNIX, and not Microsoft's Windows. I would have thought that Windows would at least crack the top three. Again, perhaps Microsoft isn't as profitable for its partners as it sometimes claims?