Earlier this month Red Hat said that it plans to "own" 50% of the server market by 2015. It appears from looking at almost two years of IDC data on the overall server market (the latest set of which was released November 29, 2007--view the pop-up image) that the Unix/Linux share of the market is stabilizing in the 40-45% range, so Red Hat can only reach its 50% goal by getting a piece of Windows' piece or a big piece of "other" while simultaneously getting almost all of the Unix baseline. Talk about setting a high bar for yourself.
Red Hat's ambitious goal makes moot the perennial question of how quickly Linux systems will displace Unix. It will have to happen by 2015, which is actually a pretty good estimate given the the mothballing of a lot of Digital UNIX, AIX and HP-UX systems. In fact that likely migration makes Red Hat's objective doable but it will require perfect execution because--of course--Novell SUSE, Oracle Unbreakable Linux (a Red Hat clone) and others also want a piece of the action. Much of the work that Red Hat is doing around virtualization, high performance and high availability is all intended to get it towards this goal.
As the data shows Windows also continues toward the 50% of sales mark; they crossed the 40% threshold for the first time in the quarter illustrated (ending September 30, 2007).
Could the market boil down to two choices--Red Hat and Microsoft--by 2015? It will likely not be that clean cut (and virtualization confuses the issue more) but the IDC data says user decision making is getting easier and easier.
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