Next-Gen

With the release of a couple of recent reports on the server market, a few trends have become quite clear. One is that you all seem to be in a replacement cycle out there: Server sales are robust, with the third quarter up 8 percent year-to-year over 2004. Another is that Windows is still the king of server software (and, with the release of Windows Server 2003 R2 literally around the corner and Windows Vista Server pegged for a year or so away, it's likely to stay that way), but Linux server software is doing fine and actually growing faster on a percentage basis, given its smaller user base. A third is that older flavors of Unix aren't the focus of the market anymore; shipments of Unix servers was down 13 percent. And a last, telling trend is that 64-bit machines are the rage; nobody is sinking money into 32-bit anymore. All told, what that adds up to is that you're taking the server market firmly into its next generation.