Linux has over time become the de facto choice of developers and IT departments around the world. This is not something that happened by accident, however. Over the past decade particularly, Linux has made great gains in the mindshare of everyday practitioners through careful cultivation via a vibrant and diverse open source community. In turn, Linux has rapidly expanded beyond traditional data center use cases and has grown to include the cloud as well as the edge for those in pursuit of deploying next-generation IT.
Commercial Linux vendors such as Red Hat have taken this a step further, building upon this paradigm and creating a vast ecosystem of hardened software and services. Enterprise customers engaging with these vendors have benefited as a result and have derived significant business value while streamlining their capex and opex investments – resulting in impressive returns on investment (ROIs), which IDC research measures and highlights in this business value (BV) study.
