Every Move Unix Makes
It?s the battle of the giants ? Unix versus the might of Microsoft?s NT. At the moment, Unix is a few points ahead, but that could all change by the time the bell rings. Annie Gurton reports
This time last year devotees of Unix were anxiously looking over their shoulders, concerned that NT might depose Unix from its throne. Now there is a new mood of optimism. Not only does Unix continue to go from strength to strength, it is also reputed to be moving into the AS/400 and mainframe markets. And although NT sales are growing fast, they are not keeping pace with the explosion of the industry as a whole, and Microsoft?s image is being tarnished by assorted problems associated with NT.
It is virtually impossible to find reliable statistics on market share and sales figures, but the gist is summed up by Geoff Morris, director of Interforum, who says: ?The size of the cake as a whole is getting bigger. It is getting bigger very fast. So it is probably true to say that NT?s sales are growing rapidly. But in the wider picture they are not growing as much or as fast as the Unix sales. But that?s not to say that people are not still watching NT very carefully. After all, it comes from the company which has redefined and reshaped the information management business, a company which will be around for a very long time.?
Similar words of caution come from Peter Macdonald, technical services manager of integration reseller Croft Computers. He says: ?NT is growing and will continue to grow. Unix is, in my view, in an unassailable position. But it would be foolish to think that Microsoft could not eventually fight, adapt and expand into the Unix market.? Macdonald, however, believes that for the time being, Unix is building on its advantages over NT while NT still struggles for credibility.
?There are lots of issues involved, but basically I don?t believe the NT message. Unix will continue to be king for many years to come,? he says.
The reason, according to Macdonald, is that Unix can cope with a diverse client strategy, while NT is essentially proprietary. It is not only standards compliant, but it was involved with the setting of many comms standards, which gives it a terrific head start. ?Unix has always been server-centric,? he says. ?Microsoft has only recently developed that strategy.?
Macdonald also has doubts about the scalability of NT, which despite contrary claims from Microsoft, has still not been proved to his satisfaction. The ability of NT to cope reliably with enterprise-strength applications is still in doubt.
?There was the NT installation at the Nat West Bank which had to be reviewed last year because it didn?t work. And in the absence of any other reference sites, I?m still waiting to be convinced. For me, Unix has everything and says it all.?
Macdonald?s view is supported by Russell Plummer, product manager at RS/6000 systems house CST. He says: ?It is true that NT is growing fast, but from a small base, not in overall terms of market size. Unix, on the other hand, is taking over the heavyweight applications which would previously have been managed by a mainframe.?
Plummer says that he sees Unix being the ?mainframe of the future? although he recognises that AS/400 continues to be a strong contender for the mid-system operating system space.
Interforum?s Morris says: ?It is good to have competition, and it is good that Unix is one of several options. It would be the worst thing for the market if there were only one choice ? that is no choice at all and just stifles development and prevents prices reacting to supply and demand.?
He is currently involved, through Interforum, in setting up a symposium in London in April to help boards and managers to ?devise ways of using today?s technology to help shape the ways we do business tomorrow?.
The future of mid-systems operating systems will be one of the topics under discussion, and there will be representatives from Sun and other Unix developers on the same platform as Microsoft. Morris says: ?People say Unix is now moving into the mainframe space, but what is the mainframe space? Does it still exist? With the power potential servers can deliver, the term mainframe is surely almost obsolete.?
NT?s dazzling image as the new mid-systems operating system has been under assault lately, with problems with underlying technology, licensing squabbles and mixed messages from Microsoft on its operating systems development strategy. Microsoft decided that everyone upgrading from early versions of NT should pay a fee ? albeit a small one ? and for many IT managers alarm bells started to ring.
Macdonald says: ?There was pressure from users for corporations to adopt company-wide Microsoft strategies, and for a while some IT managers listened to those calls and may even have started to implement NT. But once those charges came in they began to see what the future would be like, paying for upgrades all the time, and they have gone back to their old Unix strategies.?
Plummer also points out that Unix is not standing still, with development going on all the time. He says: ?Unix is now offering clustering capabilities, increased security levels, database maturity, high data throughput, the storage capabilities of mainframes and better pricing. Some of those technical benefits will soon be standard rather than options on some versions, and although NT will mature in parallel, Unix will continue to have the advantage.?
Macdonald believes that the imminent widespread adoption of network computers will seal Unix?s future. He says: ?There is no way that NT in the foreseeable future will be able to cope with the demands of a high or medium transaction network-centric application in a medium or large enterprise. Apart from anything else, such as reliability and resilience and scalability, there is the cost of ownership issue which reflects badly on NT.?
No one says that there is not going to be a place for NT in the universe of operating systems, but the consensus is that it is smaller and more limited than some expectations being promoted by Microsoft.
Macdonald says: ?One report from IDC said that Unix currently has around 33 per cent of the market and can expect a steady growth in double figures for the next 10 to 15 years. There will be a share which is Microsoft?s, but the commercial reality is that it will certainly not knock Unix out of the water, which is what some people were saying a year ago.?
Microsoft is certainly having to fire-fight some of the problems that NT is throwing up. In January, the company had to issue patches for NT?s Service Pack 2, which was itself a collection of bug fixes and new features for both versions of NT 4.
There are often problems of incompatibility with antivirus programs and problems with NT 4?s remote access services multilink capabilities. And the fixes may come too late for users who ended up removing the service pack, reinstalling the system or worse, reformatting their hard disks.
Support continues to be an issue too, with Microsoft strengthening its ranks of authorised support partners, although they still have trouble matching the credibility of IBM?s RS/ 6000 support portfolio, or the experience of the partners of Sun, Data General, Hewlett Packard or the other Unix vendors. ?They have just been in the market so much longer and are more used to dealing with large enterprises,? says Morris.
Microsoft continues to push support for its products on to its partners and manufacturers, although it does still also support NT itself. The company also has a range of options which, it says, cover the range of support demands from all its users.
Still, Microsoft is claiming steady interest and many government and The Times Top 500 sales are about to be closed. The interest is mainly in the server product rather than the workstation product, which may have more than a little to do with Microsoft?s own marketing efforts for Windows.
Synon Europe has produced a report which predicts that 70 per cent of IT managers in finance and 75 per cent in retail will move to NT across the enterprise on mission critical systems by mid-1998.
There is the persistent caveat however, that there need to be more reference sites and proven performance, and reassurance about security and access controls. Retailers want to see more information about data recovery. The report says: ?Software houses mention resilience but see it as a matter of time and image catching up with reality. NT needs scalability but in theory, scale is not a problem. It is really an image problem. It just needs to grow up a bit.?
This is a view endorsed by Guy Cuthbert of Alternative Business Solutions (ABS) who sees NT rapidly taking the Unix market share. Conflictingly, he says that this is because of the lower implementation costs of NT. ?According to the Gartner Group there is considerable differential in implementation costs, especially in systems software and databases, and the costs are lower for NT environments,? he says.
Cuthbert accepts that NT is still less scalable than either Unix or AS/400, with AS/400 being best for handling concurrent OLTP users and Unix best for large databases and high transaction throughput. He says that many ABS customers are introducing NT servers for one of two reasons: the support tactical client/server, data warehousing or internet systems or to replace Novell Network servers, especially in companies with considerable Wans.
A report from Datapro nevertheless backs up the view that Unix continues to have the edge and will sustain that position into the foreseeable future. According to that report, the number of organisations which are Unix-based, currently at 40 per cent, will grow to 50 per cent by 2000. The report also found strong interest in Linux, a Unix version developed over the Net by a group of programmers.
Still, the Unix industry is finding it hard to ignore NT, with a Dataquest report estimating installed units leaping from 961,000 in 1996 to 3.4 million this year. With the relentless improvements of Intel processors, it is a force which is persistent and for some, in creasingly credible. Yet the Unix supporters dismiss suggestions that NT will ever be able to take full advantage of the Intel developments, saying that Intel is instead creating a space which is best supported by Unix, not Microsoft.
Macdonald says: ?Unix developers are already well advanced with 64-bit versions to take full advantage of the P7, while Microsoft is still struggling to make sure that NT is stable at 32 bits.?
For others, the big opportunity lies in the space between all the operating systems, where interoperability and integration are the key. Rick Hamada, VP of marketing with Hallmark Computer Products, says: ?Our expectation is that there will be tremendous opportunity for resellers and dealers proving value and service in the interconnection of Unix and NT. It?s not black and white where NT stops and Unix takes over,? he adds.
?No one can seriously think that one or other is going to take over the world. It?s going to be co-existence. That?s what the channel has to be able to provide and support.?
In the meantime, the smaller but still significant markets of OS/390 and OS/400 should not be underestimated. Both are now fully Unix compatible, and, say some experts, offer benefits over both Unix and NT to many users. This space, as the newspaper people say, is one to watch.