IDC questioned 330 CIOs and IT managers about their use of and attitudes to Linux. The analysts found the percentage of respondents using Linux servers has nearly doubled since 1999, up to 32.4 percent. While organisations not using Linux are still in the majority, the survey also found that 4.9 percent of respondents had actually rejected the use of the open source platform.
Concerns associated with deploying Linux were also cited in the survey report, with 42.7 percent of organisations citing a lack of in-house skills as a factor, 37.1 percent citing a decision to consolidate on Windows 2000, and 36.8 percent concerned about the disadvantages of rolling out "yet another platform". However 43.5 percent of CIOs and IT managers surveyed were apprehensive about the lack of availability of applications for Linux -- the most common concern among the survey group.
IDC's director of user programmes, Catherin Bennett, told ZDNet Australia Linux isn't being rejected as a matter of principle or strategy, and is likely to catch on as the market environment changes. "Clearly these results show that the objection to the widespread adoption of Linux is not primarily strategic," she said. "As the availability of appropriate skills and applications improves IDC believed that far more organisations will go down this path."
Bennett argues that as the open source operating system has grown in popularity, traditional "philosophical" differences have fallen by the wayside, marking a shift in attitude likely to see Linux succeed in the top end of town.
"Should significant advantages then emerge from... evaluations, these organisations will be faced with a decision on whether to extend its use to at least their Windows servers," Bennett said. "At that point this survey shows that there would not appear to be philosophical objections to stand in the way of widespread adoption."
While the survey reflected a boost in popularity as a server technology, the same could not be said for Linux use on the desktop. The survey found Linux/Unix and Macintosh continuing to be "relatively insignificant at the desktop, accounting for 1.2 and 1.7 percent respectively". IDC has predicted Macintosh will continue to lose share, down to 1.4 percent, with Linux doubling its market share to 2.9 percent.
100% growth in 4 years, to become the second global platform and only real contestant to Windows' dominance in the entire IT industry.
Not bad I think.
The interesting thing is that most companies only adopt a platform like Linux when it has been shown to be a real contestant; a real player. People are more conservative when it comes to a technology that has no single 'owner'. But what happens when this platform has shown itself to be better than the other contestants over a severl year period, and still undercuts them pricewise? That platform, Linux, will gain tremendous market share.
Witness what happened with the explosive growth of the Internet from 1993-2003 after an intial 13 year period where it was just researchers and technologists who used it. Linux will do exactly the same thing.
Five years from now, it will be the main platform on the destktop, the server, in the embedded space and for super-computers.