Not surprisingly, 49% of Linux professionals believe open cloud will be the biggest growth area for Linux in 2015, according to the Dice report. These "Other" vendors are selling Linux jobs, even if they're not always selling Linux servers (at least, as measured by paid Linux distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux). These so-called "whitebox" vendors that make up the "Other" category now account for 44% of all server shipments and 26.7% of revenue. Linux in the cloudĪccording to Gartner data, server veterans like IBM and HP continue to slide as the Amazons of the world dump the name brands and build with "Other" vendors (ODMs/OEMs in Asia-Pacific). Ultimately, the global server market is Linux's to lose, regardless of what revenue breakdowns suggest. Sure, integrated systems from the likes of Cisco are doing well, but that's a higher end market that isn't likely to scale." The cloud service providers are going white box with contract equipment manufacturers. Virtualization means even fewer boxes sold. As ZDNet's Larry Dignan describes: "The cloud ultimately means fewer servers to sell. Important, in part, because they're having a deflationary impact on name-brand server sales, even as they expand the need for Linux talent.
Windows market share I've seen.Īnd yet they're hugely important, and becoming more so every day. We can count the number of motherboard shipments ( 9.3 million shipments in 2014) from ODMs, and we can assume that most of these will end up as Linux servers (at places like Facebook and Twitter), but they're not going to count toward IDC's revenue-based market share numbers, and they don't really count toward any measure of Linux vs. I'm not sure IDC and others have a way of accounting for such shipments, despite their huge impact on the market (and on Linux jobs). They're buying servers and then provisioning them according to their precise specifications.
The biggest growth driver in the server market is the cloud, but it's revenue that doesn't readily show up on vendors' income statements.įor example, Facebook, Amazon, or Google may purchase from whitebox server vendors in Taiwan, but are they buying Linux servers? Not really. A new kind of server vendorĪs ever, counting vendor revenue understates the true impact of Linux (and other open source offerings).
Which doesn't tell the full story, of course. Paid Linux servers, as mentioned, accounted for 28.5% of the total market. Here, Microsoft continues to dominate, claiming 45.7% of factory revenue in early 2014 by IDC estimates. Small wonder, then, that 55% of Linux professionals believe it will be "very easy" or "fairly easy" to score a new job in 2015.Īll of this demand for Linux talent is set against the backdrop of continued battles between Microsoft Windows and Linux for market share. 70% of hiring managers say their companies have increased incentives to retain Linux talent, with 37% offering more flexible work hours and telecommuting, and 36% increasing salaries for Linux pros more than in other parts of the company.Hiring managers are still struggling to find professionals with Linux skills, with 88% reporting that it's "very difficult" or "somewhat difficult" to find these candidates.
(The last time the Linux Foundation released numbers, 77% of hiring managers wanted to find Linux talent in 2014, up from 70% in 2013.)ĭemand has reached a fever pitch, making it hard to find and retain qualified people.
And not just a smattering of hires here and there: 50% of those surveyed indicate that they expect to hire even more Linux pros in 2015 than they did in 2014. According to the joint survey conducted by Dice and the Linux Foundation, virtually everyone wants to hire Linux professionals.