IDC's Linux survey shows market is ripe for resellers

A recent market survey, conducted by IDC and sponsored by Novell, has revealed that the more businesses seek to cut costs the more they are drawn towards Linux.

More than half of the IT executives surveyed said they are planning to accelerate Linux adoption in 2009.

In addition, more than 72 percent of respondents said they are either actively evaluating or have already decided to increase their adoption of Linux on the server in 2009, with more than 68 percent making the same claim for the desktop.

The study surveyed more than 300 senior IT executives spanning manufacturing, financial services and retail industries across the globe, as well as government agencies.

Con Zymaris, CEO of long-running Linux firm Cybersource said the recent IDC report, showing broad and aggressive adoption of Linux among businesses, isn't a surprise.

He said developments in desktop Linux technology and usability have made it viable for many classes of business users as well, adding to its pervasiveness.

"What does this mean to those of us in the channel?" he asked. "The Linux industry is using the current economic climate as another "gravitationally-assisted boost" into a higher IT orbit.

"If we aren't already aware of how we can best use Linux to benefit our customers in these financially-tight times, now is the perfect time to learn."

The major Linux companies, Red Hat, Novell, Sun, IBM and Oracle are good channel partners in this endeavour, he said.

"Start talking to them, and start talking to your customers about 'the Linux option'.

"If you don't, your competitors just might."

He said the last time there was a shift in the platform industry, was just after the dot-com bust, in 2000-2001.

Back then, many businesses had overspent on IT, placing future budgets and sometimes the businesses themselves, at risk.

"Too many CIOs had elected to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars buying servers to run their new web-applications only to find that their techs could reproduce the same results on a spare $1000 x86 running Linux, Apache and PHP," said Zymaris.

"Back then, Linux crept into the data centre through these peripheral, niche applications or network infrastructure verticals, SMTP servers, FTP servers, proxy caches, indexing and rendering engines, web-servers, file-servers etc."

Zymaris said Linux is now a strong enough contender to push aside competing platforms all on its own.

Skills these firms acquired in deploying Linux and also in dealing with the open source community and industry can now be used to improve the adoption of Linux further up the corporate IT food chain, he said.