The most aggressive expansion plans for Linux deployments will come from small companies and large organizations over the next year, according to a new research report from Zona Research.

The report follows a Zona study deployed via the Web in September that involved 109 IT professionals with purchase authority for Internet connectivity, application development tools and server software.

It found that more than half of the large enterprise respondents expected increases of up to 25 percent in the number of Linux users in their firm, while nearly one-fifth expected increases of more than 50 percent. Among small-company representatives, more than one-third felt Linux usage would expand by 50 percent or more.

The report, entitled "The New Religion: Linux and Open Source," also found that more than half of the respondents currently use Linux servers for e-mail, file and print services, intranet connection servers, standard Web servers and firewalls. Some 38 percent of respondents use it as a database server, while 21 percent use it for e-commerce applications.

Respondents indicated that the highest areas of activity going forward would continue to be Internet-based, including deploying Web applications and standard Web connection servers.

"About one in five will add those Linux-based functions over the next 12 months, while an additional one in 10 will be adding that functionality the following year," the report found.

The report also estimated that, over the next two years, the deployment of Linux commerce applications, commercial and in-house-developed desktop applications, and general office automation applications will double at respondents' organizations.

But the finding that Linux proponents, like those in the survey, expect Linux-based business applications to reach only half of their organizations "suggests that such solutions are expected to have serious difficulty displacing existing applications," according to the report.

The big guns
The study found that, among Linux vendors, Red Hat was "running away" with the operating system market, with more than half the respondents currently using it, rising to two-thirds of future users. This was due to Red Hat's OEM deals with Hewlett-Packard, Compaq Computer and Dell Computer. Caldera was Red Hat's closest competitor, with its 9 percent market share expected to grow to 24 percent in the future.

On the database front, Oracle led the pack and is expected to increase its lead to about one in every three users. Its strength derives from being one of the first major application vendors to announce it would port its mainstream database to Linux. IBM's DB2 trails Oracle8i, but it is expected to grow its market share to 22 percent in the future, the report noted.

Zona concluded that IBM would be a big beneficiary of the growth in Linux, as it would derive revenue from virtually every facet of Linux development and deployment. Red Hat was also seen as a potential winner due to its strong brand, its hefty market share of Linux operating system sales, and its many co-marketing and leveraging agreements with major partners.

But Linux's weakest position will remain in desktop applications.

"Other than some efforts to embed Linux in terminals to save vendors money, we do not envision Linux realistically emerging as a client desktop operating system outside of the Linux development community," the report states.

On the enterprise front, reliability, lower price, speed of applications and scalability were the most important factors in Linux adoption, not religious zealotry or anti-Microsoft fervor.

"Only after these practical issues have been addressed does open source code become an attractive factor in large-scale enterprise adoption," the report concluded.

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