Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
An IDC report on new x86 server shipments in the US has created waves of joy at Redmond and howls of protest in open source circles. According to IDC, Windows is now growing its server market share at the expense of Linux, which has picked all the low hanging Unix fruit.
From a report on eWeek, IDC figures suggest that
Windows now has about 70% x86 server market share, Linux about 20%,
Unix less than 10%, with Novell Netware servers making up the rest.
However, pundits and even IDC caution against taking the figures at
face value.
In the case of Linux, a substantial proportion (it's hard to say much)
of server deployments which are not included in IDC figures are on
recycled computers, vanilla boxes without any operating system
pre-installed and in virtual environments where Linux is a guest
operating system.
On that last point, it is a widely acknowledged fact that in most
organizations servers are massively under-utilized hardware. There has
been a push among enterprises looking to cut power bills and
administrative overheads to reduce the number and consolidate their
under-utilized server boxes using virtualization systems such as VMware
and XenSource. There is evidence to suggest that Linux is featuring
heavily in such deployments, although it is true that many Windows
server sites tend to stick with the devil they know.
So what is the IDC report really measuring? In a sentence, the shipment
of new x86 server hardware with pre-installed operating systems. In
that market, Windows Server is outpacing Linux but the growth is steady
rather than spectacular.
If there is one thing that the IDC report does highlight, however, it
is the challenge now facing the Linux server vendors such as Red Hat
and Novell. Both vendors have acknowledged in the past that Windows
server sites are difficult to shift and both have built their
businesses largely on converting Unix sites. Windows lock-in - or
intertia as some prefer to call it - appears to be as much a problem in
the server market as the desktop.
However, now that Linux has carved out a 20% market share, is there any
evidence from IDC to suggest that Microsoft is converting Linux sites
to Windows?
Finally, whenever we get one of these reports on the state of play of
IT in the US it is tempting to extrapolate it to the rest of the world.
Yet Microsoft, while still dominant on the desktop, has a harder time
in markets outside the US. For instance, IE7 is still the dominant Web
browser in the US but Firefox has almost reached parity in many parts
of Europe and other regions.
It would be interesting to see what the IDC x86 server deployment
figures are for Europe (including Eastern Europe), Asia and South
America. In all of these regions, recent reports indicate that Linux is
making gains in the desktop space - particularly in growth markets like
Russia and China. Is there any evidence from IDC to suggest that in
these markets the story is different in the server space?
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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