Businesses are turning to Linux en masse as they face massive budget cuts driven by the economic crisis, according to a new report.
When the global economic crisis unfolded last year,
Linux advocates were quick to predict the rise of their favorite operating system.
However, these arguments were met by seemingly logical counter-arguments that foresaw otherwise. One of them even went as far as
predicting the downfall of open-source projects.
Well, contrasting forecasts like these can be treated in equal footing until the numbers finally come out.
This month, some numbers finally came out and have been basically favouring Linux.
In a recent global survey conducted by IDC (but sponsored by Linux vendor Novell), results have revealed how IT decision makers feel about a Linux adoption in their organizations in the midst of the global recession. A white paper entitled "Linux Adoption in A Global Recession" summarized the results of the survey.
A glimpse of the white paper's introduction reveals a clear indication of what most CIO's, IT Directors, IT Managers, IT Staff, IT Consultants and the like, who were the usual respondents of the survey, thought of the adoptation concept. The introduction states:
"Economic downturns have a tendency to accelerate emerging technologies, boost the adoption of effective solutions, and punish solutions that are not cost competitive or that are out of synch with industry trends.
"IDC research finds that Linux users are clearly satisfied about their choice to deploy Linux, and during trying economic times, the potential for those same customers to ramp up their deployment of Linux is strong"Among the 330 organizations surveyed, those from Asia Pacific appeared the most aggressive in increasing Linux adoption. Of the 134 respondents coming from the region, 73% expressed interest in increasing adoption on server deployments and 70% expressed interest in increasing adoption on clients.
For comparison, 53% of the total number of respondents expressed interest in increasing adoption on server deployments and 48% expressed interest in increasing adoption on client deployments.
This interest in Linux adoption, according to IDC, stems from the fact that while most organizations aim to reduce spending because of the the economic downturn, they don't have the intention of implementing a directly proportonal reduction in deployments. In order to achieve this, they turn to Linux and its low-cost nature.
The respondents also indicated that the top 2 reasons that would enable them to accelerate new deployments of Linux would be cost reduction and stronger interoperability with Windows and other operating systems.
This raises the interesting question: Will Microsoft try to stick to its guns and promote the value of its product and service ecosystem against 'free' Linux in tough times, or will it discount to retain market share, as it has done with Windows on netbooks?
Despite all of its successes during the global recession as revealed by the research, the study did not fail to recognize the fact that Windows stood in the way of Linux's long-term growth potential; i.e., beyond the economic crisis.
In fact, Windows is still identified as the platform holding the majority position on both PCs and the x86 server hardware, one of the architectures where Linux has strongly benefited due to the crisis.bull
A free downloadable copy is available for those who are interested in viewing the
IDC white paper.