IDC RESEARCHERS reckon that the Linux market will be worth almost $50 billion by 2011.

Dropping effortlessly into premium-grade marketingspeak, IDC says that spending on the Linux ecosystem will rise from $21 billion in 2007 to more than $49 billion in 2011, driven by rising enterprise deployments of Linux server operating systems.

Linux server deployments are expanding from infrastructure oriented applications to more commercially oriented database and enterprise resource-planning workloads that historically have been the domain of Microsoft Windows and Unix.

"The early adoption of Linux was dominated by infrastructure-oriented workloads, often taking over those workloads from an aging Unix server or Windows NT 4.0 server that was being replaced," says IDC, adding that Linux is increasingly being 'viewed as a solution for wider and more critical business deployments and that the growth of Linux as a platform for business-oriented workloads appears to be coming largely from migration of existing Unix deployments in combination with organic growth of Linux deployments in these same workload areas.'

But IDC says the OS most under threat in the next few years is Unix, with the crusty old OS being attacked from all sides by Windows and Linux.

It's good to see that Linux is finally adopting a more businesslike approach by leveraging world class competencies and thinking outside the blue sky envelope. The gratuitous use of meaningless management jargon can only accelerate its penetration of ecosystems.

Now if only they could drop ridiculous code names like Gutsy Gibbon and Loquacious Lemur, they'd be home and dry. µ

L'Inq
Newsfactor