Two reports show that Linux is becoming increasingly important to small and medium-sized entities (SME). As was revealed by ZDNet.de, the operating system Linux has been growing for three consecutive years at a two-digit rate. According to a survey by the IDC carried out in February 2006, Linux with a global turnover of 5.7 billion US $ has in the meanwhile conquered the third place on the market.
Another survey by Techconsult confirms this trend also for Germany where almost one third of companies currently use Linux on their servers. Eight percent even use Linux on their clients as operating system. The success of Linux is underligned by another announcement by Pressetext Deutschland: The Linux expert Red Hat was able to substantially increase turnover and profit during the financial year 2005/06 mainly due to a big surge in Linux subscriptions. The turnover for company subscriptions rose by 53 percent to 230.4 Mio $ as compared to the previous year. In total Red Hat was able to generate an additional turnover of 42 percent to 278.3 million dollars last year.The main reason for the success of Linux with small and medium-sized companies might well be the low costs of the operating system. In addition, most applications running under Linux have open source character and are free of charge. Furthermore ist popularity is due to ist proverbial security and reliabily. 