State of the Linux union is sound

In the enterprise space, it's sound. (This is a picture from last year's summit. Don't they look excited, though?)

The key takeaway was a hockey stick graph, showing the Linux ecosystem growing from $21 billion in sales last year to $49 billion by 2011.

The big growth is coming in applications, and deployment software like databases, IDC said, meaning the current VC interest in enterprise Linux is right on target.

Things like CRM, ERP and other database-intensive jobs are migrating off Unix to Linux, the report said, with service industries and government leading the way, and healthcare lagging.

The big challenge remains Microsoft, which holds over half the enterprise market and could gain share in the next few years, even against Linux, competing fiercely to replace Unix in the enterprise.

The best opportunity to counter this, the report said, is through "software appliances" that combine the operating system with middleware, databases and applications. This would grow Linux, but at the expense of discrete applications, the report said.

The conclusion will put some huzzahs into the late afternoon barbecue and beer fests which are de rigeur after a meeting in Austin. A compound annual growth rate of 35.7% for software, and a total market of $49 billion in 2011, tastes mighty fine.

One more point, a quibble really. IDC has decided to replace the acronym SOA, for Service Oriented Architecture, with SOE, for Service Oriented Enterprise. I'm sure they have their reasons, but this constant replacement of buzzwords with more buzzwords makes everything we do more opaque.

Opacity is not what Linux is all about.