Editor in Chief : SARAH WILLIAMSCONTENTSRESOURCES    INSIDE STORYHyderabad News delves into the enterprise software market where 64-bit offerings from Microsoft, Red Hat and Novell are starting to take on commercial Unix. With 64-bit versions of Microsoft's enterprise software stack hitting the market, competition in that space is likely to get stiffer. It should also give a boost to the Redmond giant's ongoing efforts to get India Inc to make the shift to Windows Server 2003 the uptake of which has been a tad slow. The 64-bit software has traditionally been run upon RISC servers over various Unix flavours. Indian enterprises have predominantly used RISC-based servers for mission-critical deployments. Moreover, Linux going 64-bit on x86 and Itanium before Windows didn't really spur the adoption of Windows Server 2003. While Microsoft would like to take the fight to the Unix camp, it will have to deal with Red Hat and Novell first. The big opportunity 64-bit platforms are irresistible for software vendors as all mission-critical applications run on them. Microsoft has been a late entrant here. Thanks to aggressive marketing, it is gaining acceptance in the enterprise segment. Today, the company has versions of Windows Server that run on the Itanium and x86-64 hardware architectures. Despite this, analysts believe that Unix will continue to be the dominant platform for mission-critical applications in the Indian market. Meanwhile, x86 64-bit servers are finding acceptance in running ...

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