Numbers, Volume 23

While we “don’t do numbers” here at RedMonk, I come across many interesting numbers each week. Here are some:

Spring is “Everywhere”

The Spring Framework is widely used in the enterprise Java market. From my own experience, many WebSphere customers use the Spring Framework on top of WebSphere. But many WebSphere customers use the competing EJB open standard in place of the proprietary, but open source, Spring Framework. The most recent Eclipse user survey results found that of the 436 respondents building server-side applications, 47.5 percent were using the Spring Framework and 38.3 percent were using EJBs. Customers clearly exhibit a need for choice significantly higher than the proclamations of Spring’s enterprise Java domination would suggest.

There’s plenty of VMWare buying SpringSource commentary out there, including from Stephen O’Grady and myself.

Cloud Predictions

Gartner predicts the cloud-computing market will grow at more than 20% per year, from $46.4 billion in 2008 to $150.1 billion in 2013. Business processes – which made up 83% of that market in 2008, will continue to make up its bulk. The most common cloud-based functions currently are advertising, e-commerce, human resources and payment processing applications, Gartner says.

Acquia Mo’

As you might remember, Acquia opened for business in October 2008, less than one year ago. In less than one year, Acquia now supports over 250 enterprise customers across a wide variety of markets. In the last six months, we’ve quadrupled our customer base and now help support open-source solutions in places where proprietary software once predominated. Places like The Economist, Intuit, WEEI, Sony Music, Adobe and more.

“Got me feeling, like, whao”

CC Media Holdings — which owns San Antonio-based Clear Channel Communications Inc. — reported a net loss of $3.7 billion on $1.4 billion in revenue for the second quarter.

That compares with net income of $282.3 million on $1.8 billion in revenue for the same period a year ago. Revenue was down 21 percent between the two quarters.

IT Jobs

The IT jobs market turned around in July with the United States gaining 7,400 IT-related jobs just one month after losing that many.

Department of Labor statistics show the U.S. economy on the whole lost 247,000 jobs in July, but IT-related employment categories showed a collective gain for the month after posting five straight months of losses.

Since February, IT job numbers declined between 3,000 and 11,000 per month, including losses of 7,600 jobs in June.

Greasing the Skids with Linux

To give an idea of this strength, [Inna Kuznetsova, Director, Linux Strategy, IBM]. reported that in the past three years, over 1,800 customers have migrated from competitive platforms to IBM, and nearly 50 percent of those IBM wins included Linux. IBM is also picking up a lot of business from Sun, having doubled their number of Sun customer wins between first quarter and second quarter 2009. Kuznetsova attributed these recent moves to customer uncertainly regarding Sun following the recent takeover bid from Oracle.

I spoke with Inna here at OpenSourceWorld on this topic. We also had an interesting discussion about why people choose to run on non-x86 family systems, like Power. Most of the examples she cited were people who wanted high performance (e.g., oil exploration simulations) or high transaction applications. She also added some interesting color to the Russian Road-way Police case who’d been using Solaris boxes but moved to a mainframe in part because, she said, Russians tend to like and respect mainframes in what sounded like a kind of “they grew up with them” way.

The Low Hum of IT Demand

The chart below shows answers to the question:

Bearing in mind the current economic climate, how do you predict demand for IT services will change over the next two years within your organization?

See the rest of the brief report from the Aperture Research Institute. I’m right now sitting in a talk from Aperture on data center monitoring and management at OpenSourceWorld.

SharePoint

While Microsoft’s Windows sales fell for the first time in history this year, its SharePoint sales have gone up. Microsoft declines to break out the exact sales figures for the software but said that SharePoint broke the $1 billion revenue mark last year and continued to rise past that total this year, making it the hottest selling server-side product ever for the company.

Companies like Ferrari, Starbucks and Viacom have used SharePoint to create their public-facing Web sites and for various other tasks. All told, more than 17,000 customers use SharePoint.

Disclosure: IBM is a client, as is SpringSource.