"The Opportunity for Linux in a New Economy" White Paper is a Must-Read
by Kristin Shoemaker - Apr. 09, 2009Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
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With all that goes on at conferences, it would seem that a white paper presentation would be, invariably, a pretty dry event -- with the document itself being even drier. While there are many topics in the Linux Foundation-sponsored IDC white paper, "The Opportunity for Linux in a New Economy" (linked here as a PDF), and one might choose to quickly skim the research, data and projections, this report is really well worth taking a close look through.
Overall, IDC is a projecting a rosy future for Linux-related growth in the enterprise, with a compound annual growth rate of 23.6% for the 2008-2013 period. The overall market is projected to experience a 5% growth rate over that same time frame.
A few sections of the paper are particularly intriguing. For instance, the End-User Attitudes Toward Linux Deployment section examines Linux server and client deployments since the last recession, and states that 73% of respondents in the Asia/Pacific region expected to increase their adoption of Linux on servers (compared to 67% in the Americas). Desktop adoption statistics look slightly less location-specific, with 66% of respondents in the Americas and 70% in the Asia/Pacific region evaluating or actively moving towards Linux clients.
The comparison of the state of the market and technology in the current recession (versus the 2001 recession) is quite interesting. Naturally, technology changes -- it changes quickly. That aside, the technology that is currently emerging (itself partly due to changes spawned by the recession following the collapse of the dot com bubble) lends itself very well to a Linux-powered environment. The paper surveys the cloud computing and virtualization landscapes, and speculates how these technologies might foster and change Linux and open source deployments in the future.
Will Linux have the majority of the market share when all is said and done (or at least by 2013), and will all of IDC's projections come to pass? Maybe not, but IDC (and history) suggest that to some degree, we're going to witness another period of healthy growth in the open source industry. There are two things that are certain -- economies are cyclical by nature, and open source software is more than able to keep pace with technological (and financial) changes.
