Novell Inc’s NetWare 4 operating system is holding its own in the network operating system market, in spite of the fast growing popularity of Windows NT, according to an extensive survey of users in the UK carried out by IFF Research Ltd on behalf of Black Box Catalogue. The survey, which is bi-annual, found that the take-up of NT grew by 10% in just six months to September 1996, with 37% of a sample of 1,600 users using the product. Some 60% of respondents were using NetWare version 3x and 33% were using NetWare 4x, which was also up 10%. Unix suffered a small attrition, down 2% to 46%, while IBM Corp’s LAN Server and Microsoft’s LAN Manager fell 4%. Among those sites which do not use either Windows NT or NetWare.4.x, 15% said they would install NetWare and 23% said they would install NT. If expectations are translated into sales, Windows NT will be the dominant operating system, at 60% of sites, by the fourth quarter of this year.
