Ben Kevan’s Blog

With a global recession looming over the heads of many corporations, they are becoming creative to cut costs in all aspects of business including the “overhead cost” of IT.

It seems with Red Hat’s latest numbers released today, that companies are indeed switching from higher cost Unix systems, and Windows systems to Linux distributions. The following quote was taken from Yahoo Associated Press:

“In this budget-constrained environment, IT professionals are adopting open source and more specifically Red Hat to save money and enhance their competitiveness,” said Red Hat Chief Executive Jim Whitehurst in a statement.

It makes me wonder, will Novell be another gainer of the possible long term recession? Also, Novell has been very aggressive in their sales, and if it gets them into the door at some bigger corporations, that means massive growth when the subscription rate goes back from the initial buy price, to their normal maintinence cost.

Now, I guess the thing that really matters is NOVL vs RHT market share in the Linux Server Space.

Another thing to take note is neither really has a grasp on the Desktop space, but is that next? If so, then I see NOVL having a grand advantage their with SLED 11, as it will have much better integration in a “Windows World” including, but not limited to, NOMAD.