The operating system of most famous open source is gaining ground in business particularly in cloud computing, according to a report from the Linux Foundation and Yeoman Technology Group.
The Linux Foundation has published a study called “2014 Enterprise End User Trends Report” that shows the steady growth of Linux in the market for large companies, especially in recent years driven by factors such as the growth of cloud computing, in addition to its known qualities in terms of safety, capacity deployment, costs or virtualization.
The study was carried out on large companies and government agencies with at least 500 employees or exceeding 500 million dollars in annual revenue show that in the last four years, the deployment of Linux systems has increased 14% while the windows has decreased by 9%.
Specifically, analysts found that enterprise server applications are being deployed at the expense of Windows and Unix in the past four years. Deploying Linux applications has increased during this period from 65% to 79%, while deploying Windows has fallen from 45% to 36%.
Linux drives business change to the cloud as it remains the top choice for the whole topic of cloud computing. The report found that 75 percent use it as main platform, compared with 24 percent using Windows and less than two percent using 2% using UNIX. Companies believe that Linux is superior in technical, safety and cost capacity. In fact, 78 percent of companies believe Linux is more secure than other operating systems.
In particular, private clouds are increasingly used by Linux environment. When it comes to adoption, 75% companies are using Linux for private clouds, 16% public clouds are using Linux and 25% use a mix of both private and public cloud.
Linux continues to grow year after year at the expense of other operating systems. Over 87% said they are planning to implement Linux servers this year, and 82% plan to add more in the next. In fact, the deployment on Linux has increased, while deploying Windows continues to fall. To date, more than half (51%) of large companies are running production systems in the cloud, and 39 percent are planning to increase their activities in cloud computing in the next 12 months, so it is likely the market share of Linux continues to increase thanks to solutions like KVM, Xen or the famous Linux Containers.
Linux Foundation also notes that one of the most stable trend in the growing use of Linux compared to other operating system is to support mission-critical workloads. This figure has increased dramatically, from 60% in 2011 to 72% this year.
This growth makes the need for trained personnel in Linux, which is the main concern of businesses. Some businesses are using hesitant to use Linux because of system (41%), surpassing aspects as fragmentation (32%), compatibility (29%) or availability of drivers (27%) issues.
Among the respondents are Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Bristol-Myers Squibb, NTT, Deutsche Bank, DreamWorks, ADP, NYSE, NASDAQ, Goodrich, MetLife and AIG. It is remarkable that the number of companies in the Fortune 500 list already rely on Linux to choose and support their most critical software.
