In an interview at the LinuxWorld conference in Sydney, the database company suggested Linux deployments had grown beyond an adoption phase, and were now becoming ubiquitous in small and large businesses alike.
Monica Kumar, director of Oracle's Linux Program Office, pointed to the open source operating system becoming mainstream as "... businesses are looking to Linux as a way to save money," and quotes a projected growth rate of 11.7 percent per year over the next five years. The software heavyweight claims analysts project Windows' growth over the same period as being 3.6 percent per year.
"We don't come across many big companies these days that don't have a Linux strategy, which is in contrast to the market three years ago," says Kumar.
It's not just enterprise customers leading the charge, though. "Small [companies] are now betting their businesses on Linux".
Kumar points to market awareness and a growing number of Linux-savvy developers in developing countries to drive the uptake, and suggests open standards are a huge driver.
"Linux is mainstream. There are a lot of questions that we used to get maybe two years ago where people used to say, 'is Linux really ready for the enterprise. Can you give me some proof points? Who's deploying it? [...] I need to prove the ROI or TCO to my CIO about Linux'. It's been two years and I don't get that question anymore."
She also goes on to point out a shift in adoption drivers: from the developers at the front line to the CIOs.
"We're now seeing adoption driven from the CIOs, instead of from the individual developers, and it's allowing Linux to pick up momentum."
The company has recently released a free version of its flagship database product in an attempt to woo developers towards Oracle technologies.
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