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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 23, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 25
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Breaking News - Operating Systems
& Middleware:
OSDL Linux Survey Reveals Broad
Support From IT Managers
OSDL, a non-profit, global consortium of leading technology companies
dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux, and SD Times, the newspaper
of record for the software development manager, released the results of a
joint survey on the use of Linux in corporations.
The survey of 8,000* SD Times readers, mostly senior managers at
corporations
with more than 1,000 employees, showed broad and deep use of Linux in IT shops
even though only a third of the companies had adopted the open source
operating system as a corporate standard computing platform. The survey was
published in the June 15, 2003 issue of SD Times.
"Linux has already won the technical argument and now the challenge is
making
its case to the CIO," said Stuart Cohen, CEO of OSDL. "We found it
particularly interesting that these managers included stability and security
among the top five reasons for bringing Linux into their corporate networks.
These are issues where some proprietary operating systems have suffered from
well-publicized shortcomings."
"Linux continues to move from the grass-roots upward," said Alan Zeichick,
editor-in-chief of SD Times. "Development managers, software architects and
other important influencers have 'gotten the message' about Linux. Yet it's
clear that that their companies aren't yet completely sold, with only about
one out of three enterprises officially supporting Linux as a corporate
standard platform. The challenge for the industry will be to continue making
the case that adopting Linux is a smart business decision."
"These survey findings are consistent with those of our Linux studies over
the
past four years," said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of system software
research at industry research firm IDC. "We see a trend of corporations
considering Linux in more and more areas as a mainstream choice. We also see
some obstacles for Linux that the open source community, vendors and
organizations like OSDL are making real progress in addressing."
Some survey highlights:
- 59% of managers have Linux in their IT departments at work
- Most popular uses for Linux:
- Web servers (64%)
- Application servers (51%)
- Database servers (46%)
- File servers (44%)
- Custom application development (43%)
- The top reasons to use Linux?
- Stability (65%)
- Total cost of ownership (63%)
- Deployment cost (61%)
- Performance 58%)
- Security (50%)
- Major obstacles to using Linux?
- Technical support availability (35%)
- Application availability (27%)
- Quality of technical support (23%)
- Training availability (22%)
- Ease to install/deploy (21%)
- 34% of corporations officially supported Linux as a standard platform
- Where to go for Linux information?
- Web/open source community (76%)
- Linux operating system vendors (65%)
- Technical peers at other companies (58%)
- Trade publications (51%)
- Systems integrators/consultants (30%)
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