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March 19, 2009

Conducted by IDC, a new market study reveals that an increase in the use of the Linux operating system in the business world today is largely driven by the global recession.

Increasingly, and as organizations wish to reduce costs and obtain better value for their money, they are attracted by the cost savings that Linux offers.

About 53.2 percent of the IT executives surveyed planned to accelerate the overall adoption of the Linux operating system this year. Additionally, almost 73 percent of respondents say they are either actively evaluating or have already decided to increase their deployment of Linux on their servers this year, with almost 69 percent making the same assertion for the desktop.

IDC's latest survey was made with 304 senior IT executives in the global manufacturing, financial services and retail industries, as well as some government departments.

Markus Rex, general manager and senior v.p. for Open Platform Solutions at Novell said “the feedback gathered from this market research confirms our belief that, as organizations battle to reduce costs and find better value in this difficult economic recession, overall, we expect that Linux adoption will grow.”

“Businesses also said that strengthening Linux application support, interoperability, virtualization capabilities and tech support will all fuel adoption even more,” added Rex.

IDC's research also revealed some key drivers of the growing interest in Linux. The number one motivation executives gave for migrating to Linux was largely economic, and related to lowering ongoing support costs.

As a consequence, about 41.8 percent of survey participants said they plan to deploy additional workloads on Linux over the next two years, and almost half indicated that Linux will be their primary server platform by 2014.

But those who are hesitant to adopt Linux cited lack of application support and poor interoperability with Windows and other platforms as their primary concerns.

Some other key survey findings include:

About 67 percent of respondents stated that interoperability and manageability between Linux and Windows is one of the most important factors when choosing an operating system.

The retail industry showed the greatest potential for acceleration in Linux adoption with 63 percent of respondents planning an increase on the desktop and 69 percent considering the same on their servers. The government lagged, however.

Almost 50 percent of respondents plan to accelerate adoption of Linux on the desktop, especially for basic office functions, technical workstation users, and higher education/K-12.

About 49.7 percent of respondents stated that moving to virtualization is accelerating their adoption of Linux. Eighty-eight percent of recipients plan to evaluate, deploy or increase their use of virtualization software within Linux operating systems over the next 12-24 months.

From a regional perspective, Asia/Pacific is the most bullish on increasing Linux adoption, as 73 percent of respondents said they would increase deployments on the server and 70 percent on the desktop. In the Americas, 66 percent of respondents said they are either evaluating or have already decided to increase adoption of Linux on the desktop and 67 percent on the server.

The economic crisis has had the biggest effect on the Americas, and in financial services and government. More than 62 percent of respondents said that their budget has been cut or that they are only investing where needed.

"Overall, serious economic recessions have the tendency to accelerate emerging technologies, boost the adoption of effective solutions and punish solutions that simply aren't cost competitive,” said Al Gillen, program vice president, system software, IDC.

“Our research confirms that Linux users view it favorably, and this places Linux in a competitive position to emerge from this downturn as a stronger solution,” added Gillen.

IDC's survey was conducted last month and polled more than 300 IT professionals with oversight on Linux and other operating system acquisitions for their views. Participating organizations had to have more than 100 employees. The survey was looking primarily for IT decision makers familiar with Linux usage and adoption plans.

Among the survey participants, 55 percent had Linux server operating systems in use, 39 percent had Unix server operating systems in use, and 97 percent had Windows server operating systems in use.

Source: IDC.

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