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Red Hat, Ubuntu top vendor's usage study

By Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service, 02/11/08

Ubuntu and Red Hat are the most used Linux distributions among the 35,000 members of content-management vendor Alfresco's community, the company found in its second survey of trends in enterprise open-source software usage.

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The surveys help inform Alfresco's technology strategy, according to Ian Howells, Alfresco's chief marketing officer. "It's important for us to know which platforms to test against first," he said, adding, "It's in users' interest to give us good data."

Among Linux operating systems, usage of Ubuntu and Red Hat stood at 35% and 23%, respectively, according to the survey. Suse, OpenSuse and Suse Enterprise collectively garnered 13%; Debian, 15%; and "other" distributions usage of 14%.

Users also reported using a variety of proprietary enterprise software.

Among Windows users, Vista adoption was just 2%, compared to 63% for Windows XP and 28% for Windows Server 2003.

Microsoft's Office suite remained strong, however, with 66% usage. Twenty-four percent of the respondents reported they used OpenOffice. However, German and French users were twice as likely to use the latter compared to those in the U.S. or U.K., Alfresco said.

Tomcat held a dominant position in the application server category, logging 72%. JBoss' entry stood at 18 percent. Entries from Sun, BEA and IBM rounded out the field.

In the virtualization category, VMware perhaps predictably ranked highest, at 61%. Microsoft's Virtual Server took 16%, followed by Xen, Parallels, Virtual Iron and "other" offerings, according to the study.

MySQL took home the database prize, with a 60% tally, followed by Oracle with 14% and Microsoft SQL Server with 13%.

"It kind of validates that people want to have a mixed stack," Howells said of the overall results.

Alfresco collected data between July and December of last year, with survey participants coming from 260 countries, according to the company. Fifty percent were from Europe, the Middle East and Asia, while 24% were in the U.S., and 26% from other nations, Alfresco said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

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