Ubuntu Gaining Popularity For Businesses

Ubuntu is currently the most popular desktop Linux distribution. However, it is also rapidly gaining popularity among businesses around the world, according to the latest survey by Canonical and open source analyst firm RedMonk.

Almost 7,000 respondents, mostly from North America and Europe, took part in the survey. The vast majority of respondents are users of Ubuntu already, while many also use several other distributions such as Debian, Centos and Red Hat Enterprise. Survey results are separated by business size, depending on the number of employees.

Respondents were asked questions about what applications they are currently running on Ubuntu servers, and what applications they considered to be mission-critical for their business. Web servers, database servers, backups and firewalls were among the list of common, mission-critical applications.

There is a strong connection between the actual uses of Ubuntu servers and the usual mission-critical applications, which suggests that Ubuntu is sufficient for these important tasks. Almost 60 percent of small businesses, who make up just over half of the sample, are running 1-5 mission-critical applications, while 40 percent of large enterprises are doing the same. Furthermore, when explicitly asked if they thought Ubuntu was capable of running these core applications, 90 percent of respondents answered positively.

According to RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady, “It's not a validation that... [Ubuntu is] ready to compete head-to-head with Red Hat for each enterprise account... but it does put lie to the claim that Ubuntu is nothing more than a desktop OS.”

Almost 100 percent of business representatives who participated in the survey said they would deploy more Ubuntu servers in the future.