Server OS Market - A tale of two worlds

Like the server hardware market, the server OS market is very hard to get a clear picture on.  While traditional market research firms like Gartner and IDC perform measurements on units/revenue there is also another measure based on Web and DNS statistics.

In the corporate enterprise world.  MS still dominates the OS landscape. According to Spiceworks for example they show that fully 87% of all physical and VM server OS on premise is Windows Server with Linux at around 12%.

And that makes sense.  When you look at most corporate IT departments - they have Active Directory, File Servers, Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL Server.  Also the boom in the early 2000's of business applications built on Windows Server was prolific.  

What is interesting though is that the vast majority - some 45% - of those Windows servers are Windows Server 2003 - a now 13 year old server OS. Another 23% are Windows Server 2008 - which is now 8 years old.  

In many cases these WS2003 servers are running business apps built on IIS 6 and SQL 2003 and haven't been updated or refreshed in years.  And while some have been virtualized via Physical to Virtual (P2V) migrations onto VMware - they are really just being kept alive by IT departments.  

According to Gartner, other common corporate OS like AIX, HP-UX and Solaris are loosing share quickly while all flavors of Linux is growing double digits and Windows Server saw a 2% decline.

And with many customers moving to Office365 for Exchange, SharePoint and Lync services, the need for those servers on premise is waning.  Add to that Azure AD and you could make an argument for phasing out on-premise AD.  

On the internet side of the world however, it's another story.  One the firms that measures web servers, mail servers and DNS using various HTTP header readings and Whois statistics is W3Techs.   There - Unix/Linux carries a 66.6% market share vs Windows 33.4%.  

And when you look at what are being called "modern apps" like Hadoop, HPC, Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics and Containerization - these are being driven by Linux, not Windows.  

While it is very easily for example to download and install a virtual appliance of one of these modern app solutions - they almost always are based on some Linux distro - like Ubuntu, SUSE or RHEL.  

In fact MS recently announced their SQL Server v.next preview to include a version that runs on Linux.  With so many of these new apps being written to support MySQL or Postgres SQL, MS needed to get into that game.   MS SQL Server is arguably the best overall RDBMS out there - but it was loosing ground in the minds of some developers because of the lack of Linux support.

MS is trying to address this by adding more and more modern features to Windows Server 2016 like container support and the ability to run Linux apps, it may not be enough to drive new sales.  Especially when so many of the new apps are being built in the cloud.

Bottom line is this - There are two very different worlds in the Server OS Market, the corporate world and the internet world.  While MS dominates the corporate world, Linux dominates the Internet world.  As more and more corporate IT departments move apps to the cloud, the MS market share may certainly shrink as more apps will be rationalized away rather than upgraded to the latest version of Windows Server.






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