Enterprise Unix Roundup: The Secret Gardens of Unix

The second quarter server sales and revenue reports from IDC and Gartner rolled out late last month. Once again, worldwide sales numbers reflected an increase in Linux and Windows platform sales and a decrease in Unix system sales.

This is what we in the media biz like to call a trend, and it certainly has been a consistent trend over many consecutive quarters.

According to IDC, Windows server sales rose nearly 19 percent (18.7 to be exact) in second-quarter 2007, with about $5 billion filling up the tills of the big commercial hardware vendors. In terms of sheer numbers, 38.2 percent of the server market is now running Windows.

Linux boxes accounted for 13.6 percent of server revenue in the same period — and grew 19 percent, right up there with Windows' growth.

Meanwhile, Unix sales dropped 4 percent to $4.2 billion in revenue, losing ground to Linux servers more than anything else.

That, as they say, would be that, except for another telling set of statistics Gartner released at nearly the same time.

According to a Computerworld Australia story, Unix sales in the Asia-Pacific (APac) region are actually bucking the negative trend.

"Gartner's principle research analyst for server markets, Uko Tian, said in the Unix arena, Sun Microsystems and IBM are leading in revenue growth with market competition as intense as ever.

"'Blade servers were notably one of the main growth drivers for x86 server platforms during the quarter. Hewlett Packard maintained its leadership in the blade server market in the second quarter, in both shipment and revenue terms,' she said. RISC-Itanium Unix servers continued positive growth at 7.0 percent in revenue in the second quarter 2007."

That, to me, is interesting because this kind of growth is taking place in one of the fastest growing geographic sectors in the world. If Unix vendors can sustain whatever mojo they've gotten to work in APac, they might start to see a reversal of fortune in worldwide numbers.

So what is the secret sauce? It's hard to say, but one ingredient might lie in the international aversion to all things Microsoft. This is not necessarily a political trend; after all, Sun, HP, IBM and Dell reside in the United States, too. Over the years, Microsoft has increasingly alienated governments and industries throughout the world with its high-handed licensing and sales tactics. The big hardware vendors, for the most part, have learned to walk with a quieter step — something many Asian cultures can certainly appreciate.

Let's not count out Unix's strength's either: centralized control, higher inherent security and multiplatform capabilities — all things customers need, without a lot of flash.

It's no wonder, then, that several hardware vendors' executives have focused on Asia quite a bit lately, spreading the good word of their hardware and software. Sun just held an Asia Pacific Executive Summit (oddly, in the Menlo Park office), where CEO Jonathan Schwartz speculated that the region would generate as much as 40 percent of the Sun's revenue by late 2012, more than twice the amount of business the region accounts for today.

The message: Don't let the overall decline in Unix numbers fool you. In many places around the world, the seeds are sown and the servers are growing. It just may be a while before the whole world's numbers reflect this.

Brian Proffitt is managing editor of JupiterWeb's Linux/Open Source channel, which includes Linux Today, LinuxPlanet, and AllLinuxDevices.