28 Apr 2003 11:57
In these difficult times, Unix will reign in Asia-Pacific as the platform IT managers choose for mission-critical tasks, said IT analysis firm IDC.
"Unix is not dead. It will remain vibrant in Asia-Pacific as the dominant platform," said Rajnish Arora, senior manager of enterprise server research with IDC Asia/Pacific.
Speaking at IDC's Directions 2003 seminar held in Singapore on Thursday, Arora said that the bulk of Asia-Pacific server spending will go to Unix systems, seen as the only platform of choice for mission-critical server computers.
Its chief rival, Windows, has been touted as a Unix-killer in the enterprise. The latest incarnation, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, has been specially designed to run on computing-intensive, high-availability tasks, an area which been a traditional Unix stronghold.
While over half of all servers in Asia today -- low to high end -- run some flavour of Windows, expensive Unix-based computers for large businesses remain the biggest cash cow for vendors.
Arora's projections show that Asia-Pacific spending on Windows servers will only draw even with Unix roughly in late 2006, when around $3bn (£1.88bn) will be spent on each type of server.
During this period of turmoil, with the fallout of the Iraq war, a soft economy and the Sars virus hanging over Asia, pessimism and conservatism will prevail, he said.
"Customers will retain their platform investments longer than you think," he said, referring to reports which indicate rising interest in server technologies such as Windows, the open-source Linux operating system, and blade servers, which are entire computers fitted onto a slot-in card.
In Asia, Sun remained market leader in Unix boxes shipped in 2002 with over 50 percent share, easily beating rivals HP and IBM, which each had around 20 percent share. However, Arora pointed out that when measured by revenue, all three are equal, with around 30 percent share each.
"They are in a dead heat," he said.
Despite the dominance of Unix, Windows will make inroads, especially when backed by the IA64 computing platform, he said. Windows will grab a growing slice of every IT dollar spent in Asia, and eventually overtake Unix spending beyond 2006.
Linux, despite the hype, will still remain a fringe operating system used at the edge of the data centre, said Arora, while IBM's OS/390 and OS/400 operating system, while shrinking in overall market share, will continue to be an earner for Big Blue for years to come.
Blade servers, which now form only a tiny number of servers sold, will take only 18 percent of shipments by 2007. Traditional towers and rack-mounted servers will still dominate, at 38 and 44 percent respectively, in 2007.
Trying to squeeze as much computing power into as small a floor space as possible is not as much a driving concern of IT managers as had been predicted, he said.
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