Linux Growth Hits Windows Roadblock

Windows is standing ground despite the growing popularity of Linux among small and medium sized businesses. The key findings in an independent study published by Yankee Group are that Linux is more likely to be run parallel with Windows rather than displace its installed base.

Although, the open source Windows alternative is gaining momentum.

Yankee surveyed over 500 companies throughout vertical markets and found that customers perceive the quality, performance and reliability of Windows to be equal to or greater than Linux. The survey entitled "Linux-Windows 2005 TCO Comparison" analyzes the cost of ownership and return on investment of both Linux and Windows.

Some of the items that were included in the TCO tally include deployment costs, the cost of downtime, as well as the time and human resources associated with internal and external security attacks.

In spite of widespread reports of holes in Windows security, respondents rated the security of Windows to be nearly on par with Linux. Yankee credits Microsoft's ongoing reformation of its security and patch management issues for this outcome.

Windows came out on top in the time that it takes for customers to recover from attacks, recovering 30 percent faster on average.

However, Linux downtime costs businesses less; Windows downtime was found to be three to four times more costly than Linux. Yankee notes that mission critical corporate information is often stored on Windows-based systems.

"This survey not only sheds important new light into the battle waged between Windows and Linux, but also into the evolution of the server market," said Laura DiDio, Yankee Group senior analyst.

"While researching the market traction for each vendor, we discovered that server operating systems are largely commoditized. Corporate users report a high degree of satisfaction with the baseline performance and reliability of all of the major server operating systems: Linux, Windows and UNIX. Today, applications and services are the primary drivers that positively or negatively influence TCO costs, advantages and risks."

DiDio told BetaNews that Yankee performed over two dozen customer interviews to get the "back story" of the surveys. Yankee also strived to make the surveys as "pristine as possible" by using tracking and authentication software to monitor the accuracy of results.

The number of questions doubled from last year and, according to Yankee Group, all questions concerning TCO were "granular and specific" to the organization.

What's more, a different survey house was used from last year's survey, given last year's criticism of hosting being provided by Sunbelt. Funding was totally independent, DiDio told BetaNews, with no money earmarked for the study from Microsoft or any open source advocates.