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Past Symposium/ITxpo
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Tuesday, 5 November 2002 Enterprises today are torn between containing costs and expanding the range of applications and networking they support. They accept a heterogeneous infrastructure but seek to concentrate on a limited range of operating systems. Vendors follow the herd into growing market segments yet aim to distinguish themselves by dramatically improving scalability and functionality of their offerings. Holding the balance between users and suppliers are the independent software vendors (ISVs). Their enthusiasm and support for particular combination of platform and operating system “remains the single necessary and sufficient condition for success in the mainstream server market”. That is the view of Gartner vice president, Andy Butler. Speaking at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2002 in Cannes, France, on Tuesday, Butler said the leading ISVs “have the power to influence vendor server market acceptance and create market share changes and inflection points”. Unfortunately it is often hard for enterprises to be sure of ISV enthusiasm short of signing a non-disclosure agreement to identify the numbers of developers that ISVs have committed to different environments. Their support for Microsoft Windows 2000 is as clear as is their indifference to HP Tru64 Unix whose ISV ecosystem has been breaking down quickly during the past year. But the Linux open source operating system will continue to grow market share significantly. In 2002, Unix systems led the server market, followed by Windows and then others. Linux trailed in a distant fourth place. By 2007, Windows will have overtaken Unix, and Linux will have overtaken the others. Against the background of these trends in operating systems, Butler presented the sixth major iteration of Gartner’s server evaluation model. This monitors the progress of the major vendors with their flagship server models running online transaction processing of applications with large databases. The model includes 21 raw and weighted selection criteria in three broad categories: technology, momentum and business practices. The weighted data showed that IBM’s zSeries came top thanks to its technology scores rather than its ratings for market momentum or business practices, where there are no obvious leaders. After evaluation and selection, enterprises need to plan their deployments. And Butler ran through the issues affecting each of the ranges evaluated in the Gartne selection model. He then placed each on a Gartner Magic Quadrant for servers and traced its movement over the last few years. HP’s ranges with HP-UX have stayed in the leaders’ quadrant but its Tru64 range has moved to the niche players’ quadrant. Fujitsu has moved up on the scale of completeness of vision. IBM has moved its pSeries with AIX up the scale of ability to execute and looks set to challenge Sun Micrososystems for Unix leadership in the next 18 months. All the vendors continue to make product improvement central in their fight for market share and enterprises, Butler said, should exploit the competitive environment. “Get the best price and treatment from vendors by creating and maintaining an environment of competitive procurement.” But he also repeated his advice to “use ISV enthusiasm as the primary selection criterion for server platform selection.” Jonathan Green-Armytage Gartner Staff |
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