Yankee Group: Switching To Linux Won't Save Money For Large Enterprises

According to a Yankee Group survey of 1,000 IT administrators and C-level executives worldwide, corporate customers report Linux provides businesses with excellent performance, reliability, ease of use and security. The analyst group stated in a news release on Monday that Linux's technical merits, while first-rate, are equivalent but not superior to Unix and Windows Server 2003, according to survey respondents.

"In large enterprises, a significant Linux deployment or total switch from Windows to Linux, would be three to four times more expensive and take three times as long to deploy as an upgrade from one version of Windows to newer Windows releases," says Laura DiDio, Yankee Group Application Infrastructure & Software Platforms senior analyst, in a recent release. "The instances where Linux imparts measurably improved TCO compared with Unix and Windows are in small firms with customized vertical applications or new, greenfield networking situations."

The survey also found that 90 percent of the 300 large enterprises with 10,000 or more end users indicated that a significant or total switch from Windows to Linux would be prohibitively expensive, extremely complex and time consuming, and would not provide any tangible business gains for the organization.

Additionally, the survey suggested that although Linux's momentum is undeniable, the Open Source operating system will not dethrone Microsoft Windows as the leading server vendor in the next 2 years. Because of this, the Yankee Group asserts that Linux desktops are not expected to make a perceptible dent in Windows' 94 percent market share between now and 2006.