Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

Aug. 19, 2009

According to a blog post by Novell CMO John Dragoon, last year, the Linux vendor community saw an increase of more than 23 percent in its revenue growth rate, and Dragoon even expects this trend to accelerate for next year and for 2011.

While that's encouraging for Novell and its rival Red Hat, the part of the data that some observers in the Linux community find surprising is the fact that Dragoon notes that according to other forecasts, Linux operating systems revenue will exceed $1 billion in 2012 and continue to grow to $1.2 billion in 2013.

One such company that believes in this is IDC, which is often in a habit of forecasting large numbers for Linux.

"While Red Hat continues to enjoy the largest market share in the Linux vendor community, Novell had a particularly good 2008 growing Linux operating system revenue by a little over 50 percent from 2007 to 2008, while at the same time growing overall market share over 5 points to almost 30 percent last year."

A little over two years ago, IDC analyst Al Gillen forecast that the Linux ecosystem would be worth about $40 billion by next year. In 2008, IDC forecast the Linux ecosystem to be worth $49 billion by 2011.

So what gives?

To be sure, there is a certain difference in the various studies in how IDC is measuring the Linux market as it pertains to the vendor community. In some cases it's the total value of all those in the Linux ecosystem including hardware and software support services, while the new forecast is just operating system revenue.

However, it's really important to look at Linux operating system revenues, but some think it's a lot more important to look at the total value of the Linux ecosystem.

Red Hat's CEO Jim Whitehurst recently said that it's his goal to advance Red Hat to be the first open source Linux vendor to hit $1 billion in revenues. Red Hat is well on its way, but the company is now making an increasing amount of its revenues from JBoss middleware running on Linux.

Just as Red Hat doesn't sell Linux applications per se, it does sell the service and support around it.

For its part, it will be interesting to see if Ubuntu's Canonical will continue to increase its Linux vendor revenue.

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

    This article was featured on Business 5.0 and on Tech Blog.

Source: IDC.

All logos, trade marks or service marks on this website are the property of their respective companies or owners.

ADVERTISERS:
Linux News Today.org is read by over 450,000 people involved in the field of Linux application development, professional Web hosting services, Linux security, Linux Web development, etc. Inquire about our reasonable advertising rates on our news website. One of our advertising representatives will be in touch with you. Simply email us to learn about our ad rates and how we can help drive relevant traffic to your website. Advertising space is limited.