European users shun Unix, NetWare for NT What's the motivation behind the migration?

March  1997

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London (February 27, 1997) -- European corporate IT users are leaving Unix and Novell NetWare in droves to adopt Microsoft Windows NT, according to new research from International Data Corp.

Based on interviews with 500 corporate users across Western Europe during November and December 1996, the study concludes that "NT is seriously impacting the low-end systems market, and to some degree the high-end systems market."

NT servers based on Intel Corp.'s chips will double their marketshare of the desktop market in the next two years and will "highly impact" the sale of Unix workstations based on the RISC processor, according to the report.

While most users said they would adopt NT in a "gradual migration" over the next two years, NetWare and Unix users showed a considerable drop-off in their commitment to these operating systems. Twenty-three percent of Unix users interviewed had lowered their commitment to Unix in view of the developing NT trend. This number rose to 33 percent for NetWare users.

Geographically, U.K. users were more interested in adopting NT, while German users tended to remain more faithful to Unix, according to the report. French users were most loyal to the NetWare platform. Spanish users were the most reluctant to invest any money at all into NT.

Many users said they would buy PC-LAN servers running NT in the next two years. A main motivation for migrating to NT servers was that many users planned to use them to connect to the Internet.

A much smaller percentage of users said they would not buy workstations and higher-end systems at all in the next two years. However, those users considering purchasing mid- to high-range systems will most likely choose to buy Unix-based machines, according to the report.

NT Server sales rose 85 percent in 1996 over 1995, according to another study done by IDC. However, IDC also predicts that mixed Unix/NT environments are likely to prevail in large enterprises for the remainder of the decade.

"Most of the users favorable to NT are adopting it gradually through new applications and are leaving current applications either on Unix or NetWare," said Lone Poulsen, program manager for IDC's European Unix and Server operating expertise center. This result supports IDC's expectations of more mixed environments in the future, she said.

--Kristi Essick, IDG News Service, London Bureau

--Kristi Essick

Resources

• International Data Corp.
  http://www.idcresearch.com

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