Windows bumps Unix as top server OS

Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers, IDC analyst Matthew Eastwood said of the firm's latest Server Tracker market share report. "It's the first time Unix was not top overall since before the Tracker started in 1996."

And in another first, fast-growing Linux took third place, bumping machines with IBM's mainframe operating system, z/OS. Linux server sales grew from $4.3 billion in 2004 to $5.3 billion in 2005, while mainframes dropped from $5.7 billion to $4.8 billion over the same period, Eastwood said.

Servers are powerful networked machines for tasks such as handling e-mail, financial transactions, airline reservations and file storage. According to IDC, the overall server market grew 4.4 percent to $51.3 billion from 2004 to 2005. Another market watcher, Gartner, released data Tuesday that largely agreed, with 4.5 percent growth to $49.5 billion.
Conventional wisdom in the 1990s forecast that Microsoft's Windows would inexorably move to market leadership, but its arrival was slowed by several factors. For one thing, Windows took much longer to mature than many expected. For another, Unix--in particular Sun Microsystems' Solaris--succeeded wildly in the dot-com spending spree. And out of the blue came Linux, an operating system modeled after Unix but popular on the same hardware as used by Windows--servers built with x86 processors such as Intel's Xeon and, increasingly, Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron.

The Unix market, though, is still huge, and the three major players are fighting for every scrap. In another first, IBM secured the top spot in 2005, with 31.8 percent of the market to Hewlett-Packard's 29.8 percent and Sun's 26.2 percent.

"They set that out as a goal, and it does appear they achieved it," Eastwood said.
Sun is trying to restore Unix fortunes as well by making Solaris an open-source project and bringing it to x86 servers. Although Sun's Unix revenue continued to decline, dropping 10 percent to $4.6 billion in 2005 according to Gartner, Sun dominated unit shipments with 59 percent of the 272,000 shipped.