Linux Investments Looking Up for 2015

Now that Linux has essentially gained parity with Windows across the enterprise, solution providers have a vested interest in where customers who will make use of the open-source platform in 2015 are headed. In a new survey of 115 customers, Red Hat finds that, in general, optimism concerning IT spending in 2015 is relatively high with investments in mobile computing and big data topping the priority list. Just over half those customers are planning new application deployments on Linux, but perhaps most interesting to the solution providers in the channel is the fact that 26 percent are planning on migrating application workloads from Windows to Linux and another 15 percent are planning to migrate from Unix to Linux. Most of the application workloads also appear headed for private or hybrid clouds rather than public clouds. Also of note to solution providers should be the fact that 33 percent either already have or plan to embrace containers as an alternative form of virtualization in 2015 for reasons, ranging from the ability to deploy applications faster to streamlining testing and development.