Companies Test on Windows, Deploy on Linux

Published: August 1, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In one of the more interesting stories that has come out during this relative quiet summer season in IT, a survey done by Alfresco Software, a provider of open source content management software and paid-for support for the product, shows what could be some major shifts in the ways that Linux and Windows are used by IT departments. They might be, in an ironic twist of fate, reversing their roles.

Alfresco did a survey of its 15,000 community members from April through June of this year, and because it supports both Linux and Windows with its products as well as Mac OS and Unix, the English company believes that it is a pretty good barometer of what is happening on those systems. The fact that it was able to gather up information from 10,000 of its community members also increases the relevance of its survey data; asking questions of its 300 paying customers would not be so relevant.

In any event, according to the survey, Windows is increasingly popular as a means of evaluating software, but when it comes to actually deploying the software, enterprises actually choose Linux. Alfresco found that users evaluated the content management system on Windows about as much as on Linux, which makes sense given that most of the world that sits at a PC sits at a Windows PC. And with enterprise licenses for Linux being pretty inexpensive--at least if you don't need 24x7 support--it makes sense that companies are willing to give Linux a whirl on the server supporting programs like the Alfresco CMS.

According to the report generated from the study, which you can read here, during the evaluation phase, 43 percent of respondents chose Linux, 42 percent chose Windows, 10 percent chose Mac OS, and 5 percent chose Unix. But moving to the deployment stage, only 29 percent chose Windows, compared to 52 percent for Linux, 12 percent for Mac OS, and 7 percent for Unix. All other operating systems take a bite out of Windows when it comes to deployment. And when it comes to Linux, by the way, the Alfresco barometer indicates a fairly balanced pie among the major Linuxes.

However, the survey respondents also indicated that in the wake of the alliance between Novell and Microsoft last November, deployments of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux to run the Alfresco CMS have been growing at twice the rate as for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Ian Howells, chief marketing officer at Alfresco, thinks this might mean that Linux shops don't like the Microsoft deal. But it might just mean they like Red Hat better. It is really hard to say.

Moving up the software stack from the operating system, users of the Alfresco CMS tended to use the open source Tomcat application server or the JBoss application server that is now controlled by Red Hat. Even in production environments for Linux and Windows boxes, these two beat out alternatives from Sun Microsystems, IBM, and BEA Systems. Tomcat was used by 48 percent of respondents when they deployed Alfresco, followed by 22 percent using JBoss. Sun's Java Application System had a small slice during the evaluation phase, but rose to 10 percent during deployment. IBM's WebSphere had 6 percent of the pie, more than double its share during evaluation.

As for databases, MySQL is the database of choice for both testing and deployment, with PostgreSQL a "surprisingly close second" in the Alfresco survey. Of the proprietary databases, Oracle's eponymous products were the most popular. MySQL had 40 percent of Alfresco deployments, compared to 28 percent for PostgreSQL, 19 percent for Oracle, and 6 percent for DB2.

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot