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Dubai: The competition between Windows and Linux has finally reached the Gulf, thanks in part to the region's rapid increase in server hardware.
According to Desmond Nair, Microsoft's group manager for servers, the Gulf region has the highest server growth across Europe, Middle East and Africa: 23 per cent. Both Microsoft, which is launching a campaign to promote Server 2008 in the Gulf, and Red Hat, which dominates the enterprise Linux market, are fighting for their piece of the action.
Nair estimates that Microsoft is providing software for 90 per cent of the new servers. But while Microsoft claims to dominate in market share, Red Hat has established a niche in the Oil and Gas sectors, thanks to the software's ability to better utilise a computer's ability to process large amounts of data.
Franz Meyer, a senior director for Red Hat, said the software's advantage comes from its ability to multitask. "Windows has never been good at that," he said.
Red Hat first established itself in the oil and gas sector in Saudi Arabia.
"Our biggest customer is Aramco, who have been a customer for many, many years," said Red Hat vice-president Warner Knoblich. "They are running over 6,000 servers, or cluster nodes, plus they have over 1,000 work stations which are specific to the oil and gas, where they need dramatic computer power."
Red Hat has also announced its intention to open an office in the region. Previously the company was represented mainly by channel partners, but it makes sense for Red Hat to make a stronger commitment to the region, Knoblich said.
"Microsoft is feeling the heat," he said.
Nair disagrees, pointing to a report by IDC, which says that Windows will outpace the growth of Linux and the other server operating systems on the market.
"We're not seeing a massive Linux influx in this region," he said, and although he acknowledges Red Hat's head start in the oil and gas sector, he said Microsoft is beginning to make inroads of its own.
He said Microsoft has made its entrance into the industry with a yet-to-be-disclosed client. "Hopefully that will give us a deeper relationship with the oil and gas industry," he said.
Both companies are heavily pushing the virtualisation technology in their software, which allows companies to run several applications, which would usually require several servers, on a single machine.
According to Bill Teuber, vice-chairman of EMC, a data management company, virtualisation in the server market is one of the hottest spaces in technology. EMC owns 86 per cent of VMware, a company that specialises in virtualisation software.
"If you talked about virtualisation four years ago people would have scratched their heads. In today's environments, its one of the top trends," he said.
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