Enterprise Software - Server OS

Like the desktop OS category, the server OS category is also predominantly ruled by various versions of Windows. Across both segments, Windows Server 2003 emerged as the winner, and it's even ahead of its successor Windows Server 2008 by a huge margin. The interesting thing we found here was that amongst 100-499 employee organizations, there are still a lot of users that are using the outdated Windows NT OS. This is possibly because many companies are still running their legacy apps on these servers and are therefore not upgrading to newer versions. Another startling fact is that barring SUSE Linux, none of the other Linux distros received sufficient votes individually to make it to the Users' Choice club. We have therefore combined their votes to provide an idea of the mindshare commanded by Linux in the server OS market.

In the 100-499 employee segment, Windows Server 2003 enjoyed the highest top of mind recall amongst 50% of all the survey respondents. However, Windows NT had the highest current brand ownership of 60% amongst the respondents. Not only that, Windows NT is the only OS to enjoy 100% brand loyalty, despite being an outdated OS. Windows Server 2003 commands 82% brand loyalty, with 7% of its existing users likely to shift to Windows Server 2008. This is good for MS, but not definitely better.

In the 500-1000 employees segment, Windows 2000 Server stood third in the Users' Choice Club this year. Windows 2003 Server once again enjoys the highest ToM at 50%, a current brand ownership of 56% and brand loyalty of 77% relative to other brands in the segment. It was Windows server 2008 that enjoys the highest shift-in, 39% of the users from other brands are likely to shift in to it. Windows 2003 Server, despite being a winner, had the lowest brand loyalty of 77% in this segment, with 11% of its users likely to move to Windows Server 2008 in near future.

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