Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Closer Look

Toyota, Google, Facebook, New York Stock Exchange, Burlington Coat Factory, Amazon. These names represent just a handful of the thousands of large companies using Linux today. As early adopters of Linux (some having used the OS well over a decade) with some of the most technically advanced challenges to overcome in their business environments, companies such as these can give us important insight as to how Linux is being used and where it's growing.

That is why we started surveying large companies using Linux in 2010 and why today's new report, "Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users," sheds light on what we can expect from enterprises, both large and small, that are using Linux. We hope this research can help inform the industry, our members and us as we prioritize our work for a New Year.

In order to intimately understand the adoption trends among this elite level of companies, we filtered the responses to our survey to collect just the data from companies with more than $500m+ in annual revenues or 500+ employees. You will find a variety of new data points in this year's report, but here's three that I think are interesting and/or surprising.

Linux is growing, even as spending forecasts remain bleak...