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Port80 Software earlier this month released the results of its July 2003 survey of the Top 1000 Corporations’ Web Servers, which details which Web servers are in use among Fortune 1000 enterprises.
Port80 Software’s latest survey of the Fortune 1000’s Web servers indicates that IIS remains firmly entrenched as the server of choice.
The results mirror those of the original survey conducted in January 2003.
However, a number of trends can be pinpointed when the two sets of results are placed side by side.
The survey found that despite substantial changes to the list of companies from 2002 to 2003 (a more than 10 percent change in the sample base), the overall market share of Web server software among the Top 1000 corporations remained relatively constant.
Once again, IIS is the Web server of choice for the majority of Fortune 1000 enterprises. The July survey pinpointed the beginnings of Windows Server 2003 and IIS penetration. Already five of these companies, including CDW, Martin Marietta Materials and Warnaco, have moved to Microsoft IIS 6.0 and are using Windows Server 2003.
Port80 speculates that due to the consistency in numbers from last year’s survey to this July survey, IIS has a higher penetration overall in midsize and large enterprises than do other servers.
This is good news for Port80, as this 50-percent-plus consistency indicates Microsoft IIS’ pervasive penetration into U.S. companies’ Web servers, and Port80’s primary business is developing products for IIS-based Web servers and sites.
The survey data also indicates a general shift from Microsoft IIS 4.0 on Windows NT to Microsoft IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000 (around a 4 percent shift), which runs contrary to the predictions that NT users would be the most likely candidates to upgrade to Windows Server 2003.
The vendor also contends that Apache is not used as much as previously thought when it comes to large and midsize enterprises. It noted that Netscape continued its historic decline among the Fortune 1000 in July’s survey, this time losing 2.4 percent. Port80 believes this trend will continue.
Port80 further argues that its findings call into question the generally accepted, not to mention widely cited, numbers from Netcraft’s monthly survey, which consistently place Apache at the head of the pack. The August 2003 survey placed Apache in the top spot with a 64 percent market share. Microsoft-IIS, in second, held a mere 23.75 percent of the market, a stark contrast to what Port80 found. Netscape trailed in third with less than 4 percent.
Survey results were the following:
| Vendor | Server | Penetration | Total |
| Microsoft IIS | IIS 5.0 | 42.7% | |
| IIS 4.0 | 10.5% | ||
| IIS 6.0 | 0.5% | 53.7% | |
| Netscape | Enterprise 4.1 | 9.9% | |
| Enterprise 6.0 | 4.1% | ||
| Enterprise 3.6 | 3% | ||
| Enterprise 4.0 | 0.5% | ||
| Other Netscape | 1.1% | 18.6% | |
| Apache | Apache 1.3.27 | 4.2% | |
| Apache 1.3.26 | 3.8% | ||
| Apache 1.3.12 | 0.7% | ||
| Apache 1.3.19 | 0.7% | ||
| Apache 1.3.22 | 0.5% | ||
| Other Apache | 6.1% | 16.0% | |
| Other Servers | IBM-HTTP | 3.2% | |
| Lotus-Domino | 2.1% | ||
| Other | 4.5% | ||
| Unknown | 1.9% | 11.7% |
Source: Port80 Software
A major reason for the discrepancy is that the way Netcraft gathers its data is to “collect and collate as many hostnames providing an http service as we can find, and systematically poll each one with an HTTP request for the server name.” As a result hosting vendors using Apache to serve numerous sites bump up Apache’s numbers.
