International Data Corp’s Server Operating Environments: 1988 Worldwide Markets and Trends, which sets out a five year forecast for sales of all the major server operating environments, found that Microsoft NT Server and Unix both continued strong growth in 1997, while Novell NetWare dipped and OS/2 declined. Sales of NT server software licenses grew 73% in 1997, compared with 17% growth for Unix, but over half of those sales were for file/print server use, a sector that only 10% of new Unix servers were sold into. NetWare shipments outpaced Unix, but declined 7%, while OS/2 declined 36%. IDC sees the trend of volume deployment for NT and NetWare and large scale value deployments of Unix servers as continuing over the next few years. NT’s worldwide server base will surpass that of Unix in 1999, and NetWare by 2000. The report also includes information on VMS, OS/400, and, for the first time, Linux.
