The newest press release on our site announces the results of our 2008-2009 Unix Vendor Preference Survey. This time, our survey period spanned two calendar years (late 4Q08 – early 1Q09). We delayed it a bit in order to avoid the immediate aftermath of the economic tumble; too much turmoil and uncertainty could have skewed our results. Our survey base has broadened since last time due to our partnership with The Register. More respondents than ever were from large organizations, which shifted the percentages in several survey categories.

Points of interest:

We’ve found that large-enterprise customers rely heavily on Unix systems, be they from IBM, HP, or Sun Microsystems. An astounding 91% agreed that their Unix systems were “strategic” in their organization.

The trend we spotted in earlier surveys continues: not only are customers buying more Unix systems, they’re buying ever-larger ones.

Virtualization is moving along as expected; customers in the Unix world are seeing and reaping its benefits. Power, cooling, and floor space are still of moderate concern to most customers, and they believe that Unix systems provide a superior value on facilities measures.

Vendor vs. Vendor:

This particular snapshot in time shows a horserace between IBM and HP in the Unix market. The two swapped leadership in almost every category, with Sun coming in third. We believe that more than a little of this is attributable to Sun being ‘in play’ during the survey period and undergoing some level of turmoil for the past two years. We don’t see Sun ‘falling off the cliff’ in terms of customer loyalty, at least in the near future. We think Oracle is going to move forward with Sun hardware, software, and o/s. It will be interesting to see, when we do this again in a few months, what Sun customers and others think about this – and what they think of the future of Sun.

HP’s scores increased significantly on a number of measures. We’re not sure whether this is due to an actual change in perceptions or because more of our respondents were from large corporations, which are the sweet spot for Unix in general and HP in particular.

IBM is still, well, IBM. They notched high scores on a number of categories, and from a sales standpoint, they’re still the vendor to beat. Back in the Unix wars of the late 90s, IBM was a distant third; today they’re one of the big dogs at the front of the pack. That’s quite an accomplishment.

We will be generating research reports that discuss how the vendors are doing and how they scored, along with other aspects of the survey, over the coming months. The first of these reports are live on our site here.

If you have questions about this research, or other research we conduct, or the state of Unix in general, or vendor vs. vendor rankings on specific topics… or really most anything… drop us a line at gcginfo@gabrielconsultinggroup.com.