By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Researchers at International Data Corp reckon that despite all the noise made about Windows NT/2000, the combined Unix market will nonetheless retain its position as the number one platform for middleware systems software deployments for the foreseeable future. When looking at the middleware market, IDC pulls together middleware – transaction processing, message queuing, object middleware and other types of software that glue programs together – and what IDC is calling businessware – event-driven processing and business process automation applications that in turn glue application suites together – into a single category it calls the real-time enterprise application integration (EAI) market. IDC says that this middleware/businessware market will more than quintuple from $2.2bn in sales last year to $11.6bn by 2003. In 1998, the Unix slice of that market came to $884mn, or about 41% of the market. Unix beat out the 32-bit Windows market, which had $464mn in sales or 22% of the market, followed by the IBM/PCM mainframe with $418mn or a 19% share. Older 16-bit Windows pulled in 7% of sales, OS/400 and OS/2 each 3% of sales, and OpenVMS 2%. The remaining 2% of the market was spread among other less popular platforms.
Unix’s numbers are interesting because they indicate the platform is not losing out to NT, says Ed Acly, director of IDC’s system infrastructure software program. Even though Acly isn’t willing to take a stab at exactly how the operating system breakdown in the middleware/businessware market will look in four years, he thinks Unix will still be on top then. I would say that going forward, Unix will definitely hold its own, says Acly, it has so far.
Last year, the US middleware/businessware vendors dominated the market, with over 74% of total revenues. The US also consumed about 49% of the middleware/businessware software. Western Europe was the next biggest spender on this type of software, accounting for 32% of sales.
The top standing of Unix environments in the middleware/businessware space is one of the major drivers behind Unix server sales. A recent report from IDC showed that Unix dominated the worldwide server market last year – in terms of aggregate server revenues and will continue to do so until 2003. IDC projects that worldwide server revenues will grow from $65bn in 1998 to $89bn by 2003, and that Unix servers will account for $37bn in sales in 2003, or about 41% of the total market. That will still beat Windows NT/2000’s share in the same year. NT is expected to grow at a 25% compound annual growth rate to $26.9bn in server sales – about 30% of worldwide sales – in 2003, but even with that impressive growth and all the hoopla about NT, servers running that operating system accounted for just under $9bn in sales worldwide, or about 13.8% of the server market. á
