Cloud.com, BitRock, and Zenoss have surveyed more than 500 members of the open source and systems management community about trends in cloud computing and users' preferences and plans. The result? There's a strong correlation between open source and cloud usage — and the survey found that Linux looms large in plans for deployments.
The survey was taken by 521 IT professionals in a broad variety of institutions, with 9% working for public companies, 51% working for private / privately-held companies, 11% working in educational institutions, 5% in government, and 4% at non-profits. The respondents range from CTOs (11%), IT managers (18%), to technical support (7%) and developers (12%).
Now that we have a profile of the people responding, let's take a look at the results. One of the most interesting, here at Linux.com at least, is the OS that respondents plan to run. Overwhelmingly, Linux was on the shopping list for 83% of the respondents — compared to 66% for Windows, 8% looking to BSD, only 5% for Solaris, and 12% choosing "other." Naturally, many shops are looking at mixed deployments to satisfy needs for applications that run only on Linux or Windows, but it's clear from the survey that Linux is doing quite well.
The economy has forced businesses to make certain changes, and individuals as well. The open source community is making dramatic changes in how they approach software, and the growing robust support for Linux has made it an attractive choice. No longer do you have to hire a guru to just oversee Linux, and users don't need a two year learning curve in order to use their computers.
This is good news, because the shape of computer use is leaning towards cloud storage, and Microsoft will begin to lose its grip on the public. Eventually, it will not matter what OS you use, documents and common programs will feel similar enough that the average user can find their way around.
No comments:
Post a Comment