OStatic

Upcoming Linux News Looms From Novell and Red Hat

As The VAR Guy notes, between today and September 4th, a lot of key information will roll in about the Linux market, and how Linux is faring in IT departments. Novell is slated to release its third-quarter financial results on Thursday of this week. The company has recently run into trouble drumming up deals and business on the Linux front, affecting its earnings significantly, but there could be news of a turnaround. Meanwhile, Red Hat has its Red Hat Summit approaching, September 1st through 4th in Chicago, and the excellent roster of speakers includes EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian, IBM's Bob Sutor, and many others. I'm betting that both Novell and Red Hat will have good news, and some interesting data to digest.

IDC's recent Worldwide Linux Operating Environment 2009–2013 Forecast, points to what a critical time this is for Linux, as budgets in IT departments are strained, and open source solutions look ever more attractive:

"The economic downturn is impacting nearly every IT market segment and has placed its mark on the Linux server operating environment and client operating environment markets, says Al Gillen, program vice president, System Software at IDC. "The long-term prognosis for Linux is good, but we see 2009 as a turning point for the nature of Linux adoption and deployment, as customers rationalize through the new economic realities and factor in other considerations such as the best way to use virtualization software. In the end, the markets of tomorrow are going to behave differently than the markets of the past."

IDC’s projections showing Linux operating systems revenue exceeding $1 billion in 2012 and continuing to grow to $1.2 billion in 2013, which is significant if you consider that Linux operating system revenues didn't exist only a few short years ago. "All in all, the momentum for Linux continues," wrote Novell Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon, in a recent blog post. He also noted this:

"In 2008, the last full year of data, the Linux vendor community saw a 23.4% growth in revenue, well north of the single digit increase in operating system revenue at large. And while Red Hat continues to have the largest share, Novell had a particularly good 2008 growing total Linux operating system revenue by 50.3% from 2007 to 2008 while growing overall market share over five points to 29.8% in 2008."

Can Novell recover from the recent hiccups in its Linux business? As IT departments become more comfortable with Linux, I think the path will be up for Novell. Meanwhile, Red Hat has continued to deliver quarter after quarter of great financial results, and The Red Hat Summit should yield lots of interesting data about the company's efforts with The Open Source Channel Alliance, JBoss, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and more. As a sign of how significant Red Hat Summit has become as an annual event, Cisco is sponsoring this year's meetup. Stay tuned to OStatic for updates as they're available.
 

• linux
• Red Hat
• novell

Share Your Comments