Federal govt. leads in switch to UNIX, system interoperability: half of survey respondents need...

A new survey shows that the federal government uses more UNIX-based systems and less MS-DOS than all other private industry sectors. Conducted by DMR Group Inc. of Montreal, the survey found that 30 percent of all federal government agency respondents said their agencies use UNIX, compared to

At least 92 percent of the 160 government agency respondents also said they use MS-DOS; 27 percent also use VMS; 17 percent also use Macintosh; 16 percent MVS/VM/VSE; 11 percent OS/2; and 31 percent also use other operating systems.

One of the most illuminating survey findings was that fully half of the federal respondents said they need systems that can run both MS-DOS and UNIX concurrently. Thirty-two percent of federal UNIX users said they run UNIX on mainframes, 48 percent in minicomputers and 49 percent on workstations.

Perhaps the second most interesting findings -- but no doubt the least surprising to many veteran software vendors in the federal sector -- was that federal survey respondents had the lowest amount of vendor loyalty. More than half said they are considering an open systems policy, have already adopted some open systems standards or are in the process of doing so. Thirty percent said they think the federal government will soon increase it dependence on open systems a great deal.

The survey indicated the biggest federal priorities are applications portability and distribution, and network architecture development. Federal users stressed that at present, data exchange between systems is too difficult and since they plan to buy applications instead of create them, they need to be able to move applications from system to system no matter what operating system is involved.

As a result, the typical federal ADP buyer was found to believe most new applications will use UNIX, that UNIX will be rapidly integrated into federal systems for main data processing tasks, that UNIX will lead to more flexibility in selecting vendors and -- most important to federal bean-counters -- UNIX systems will provide the best price-performance value.

Other main findings of the DMR survey of 2,375 commercial and federal ADP users follows:

* The total market for open systems, while emergent, is growing quickly and is here to stay -- driven substantially by a need to adopt a new architectural paradigm in order to be effective in a changing environment. Organizations which are focused on using information technology in new ways to improve their effectiveness are significantly more likely to adopt open systems standards and technologies.

* "The Year of UNIX" was 1989, when, for the first time, more sites were using it than any other multiuser operating system.

* Based on purchasing activities of respondents, the UNIX share of systems revenues was 12 percent in 1989. It is expected to be over 25 percent by 1995.

* Open systems standards and UNIX adoption are more likely to occur where there is a need for leading edge solutions such as distributed, complex applications, heterogeneous networks or advanced development technologies.

* The greatest barrier to adoption of open systems solutions is widespread lack of awareness and uncertainty regarding opportunities, standards and other key issues. For example, fewer than one third of the decision makers surveyed indicated their organization had any awareness of the advantages and disadvantages of open systems.

* Rapid growth in adoption of open systems standards and technologies is occurring. These include frameworks such as X/Open CAE, Posix, the NIST Applications Portability Profile and OSI, and technologies such as Unix, Motif, Open Look, SQL databases and TCP/IP.

* The more open systems are viewed as important, the more perceived vendor competition around standards is a barrier to purchasing. In other words, vendors conflict about standards is having its greatest negative impact on the customers who care most about open systems.

* Conventional wisdom that UNIX is used primarily for scientific and technical computing is wrong. While Unix is very strong in this area, applications running on the greatest number of screens could be classified as commercial data processing, including accounting, order entry/inventory, material management, OLTP and industry specific applications. The largest single application areas are office systems, software development and engineering.