“Windows NT has been hyped for some time as the
next-generation enterprise operating environment, but Unix sales
continue to be strong. That’s based largely on customers’ needs for
reliability, scalability, high availability, manageability, and
security-especially for critical applications…“
“Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at IT advisory firm Illuminata,
makes this case for why Unix continues to sell well at the high end
of the market: “Users can’t buy terabyte-sized data warehouses or
E-commerce systems that feature 100,000 transactions per minute on
NT,” he says…”
“No software developer wants to admit that it won’t support any
operating system its customers need. But IBM’s Samant says most
application developers can ill afford to support more than three or
four versions of Unix. In three to five years, he predicts, the
major Unix brands still standing will be Hewlett-Packard’s HP-UX,
Sun Microsystems’ Solaris, and Monterey, a multivendor Unix on
Intel and RISC effort led by IBM. “Linux will also be a factor,” he
adds.”