By William Fellows
Preliminary IDC research for shows that last year Windows NT was the fastest growing server operating system for the second year. Unix still commands the lion’s share of the revenues with $2.8bn sales of all flavors. Microsoft shipped 1.56 million NT Server licenses in 1998, 27.2% up on 1997. NetWare shipped 1.05 million licenses, up 13%; and all Unixes shipped 758,000 licenses, up just 4% on last year, primarily due to server consolidation, IDC says. Linux server ships grew most dramatically, from 240,000 in 1997 to 750,000 in 1998, though there is little revenue in that market. IDC estimates server installations account for some 26% of Linux’s total installed base. Most Linux servers are being used for web serving but now that Informix, CA, Oracle and other applications are up on the environment it expects commercial shipments to step up significantly. Following Unix’s $2.8bn revenue comes NT with $1.4bn, and NetWare at $650m, something of a resurgence over 1997. NT accounted for 35.8% of unit server ships in 1998, NetWare 24.2%, Unix 17.4%, Linux 17.2%, OS/2 3.0 and others 2%.
