IT-Director.com: Linux: The Penguin Marches On

“IBM informs us that it has over 300 zSeries customers
who are piloting Linux. It also claims that a further 400 are
likely to get involved in pilots. The zSeries is the current brand
name for the S390 mainframe. So we are witnessing a significant
interest in Linux from big companies (by and large, it is only big
corporates that have mainframes).

To this news, we can add the remarkable conversion of Amazon to
the Linux cause. Amazon.com, the online retailer, claimed in a
recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission to have
cut technology expenses by $17 million (about 25 percent, from $71m
to $54m). It attributed the bulk of this impressive cost saving to
a migration from Unix to Linux, although it also managed to cut
some of its data and telecommunication services costs.

Linux now appears to have somewhere in the region of 30 percent
of the server market, although much of the anecdotal evidence
suggests that it is taking more business away from Unix that it is
from Windows NT. In reality, this should be what we should expect ?
after all migrating to Linux from Unix is easier and most software
will port from one to the other.”

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