Linux Server Revenues Growing Faster Than Windows, Hit $2.4 Billion in 1Q12

From the ‘Linux = $$’ files:

IDC is out with its first quarter 2012 global server stats study and the numbers look good for Linux.

While overall global server revenues were down, Linux server revenues were up.

According to IDC, Linux servers generated $2.4 billion in revenue for vendors in the first quarter of 2012. That’s a 16.0 percent growth rate, which is better than the 1.3 percent revenue growth rate for Windows servers.

Linux still has a lot of room to grow, as Linux servers now account for 20.7 percent of global server revenues. In contrast, Windows revenues account for 50.2 percent of global server revenues. Unix represents 18.3 percent.

That’s right, Linux server revenues are greater than Unix (and yeaah Unix servers are a whole lot more $$).

The fact that Windows still holds the majority of the server market (by revenue) is a fact that I’d bet is likely to change inside of this calendar year as Linux continues to grow fast.  

Remember of course, that IDC can’t track servers that have been ‘re-purposed’ as Linux server or those servers where companies put Linux on it themselves, so the true numbers might be larger. Revenue numbers also cannot account for ‘free’ deployments of Linux, such as CentOS which are extremely common on hosting infrastructure.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.