As much as it may pain Red Hat, Oracle, the Free Software Foundation - and maybe now IBM - it seems that Novell is actually in resurgence.

According to a new survey by the Yankee Group due out next week, 14% of the nearly 1,000 IT managers and C-level executives polled said they will deploy SUSE Linux.

Yankee thinks, "This is one of the first indicators that Novell's technically elegant and highly reliable Linux distribution may mount a serious threat to Red Hat's heretofore unassailable dominance of the Linux market."

It will also pain Red Hat, Oracle, FSF, IBM and the Linux community in general to hear that Yankee found that roughly 12% of Windows users who defected to Linux in the last 24 months are now back in the Microsoft fold. And, Yankee adds, SQL Server deployments remain robust.

Microsoft's problem, it appears, is with Exchange. Twenty-three percent of Yankee's survey group figure to drop Exchange, switch and go to Linux or open source e-mail and messaging over the next 12-18 month because they figure the alternative is cheaper and easier to manage.

Yankee also awards HP a nearly four-point increase in server market share that it stole from Dell in the last 18 months or so.

Yankee says that the results of its survey, its second Global Server Hardware and Server OS survey, indicate that three out of five businesses keep their mainstream file, print and application servers in use for four-six years regardless of the underlying operating system, particularly file and print servers, and particularly Windows machines - there's more turnover in Linux - and that corporations remain cash-constrained and cautious.

The survey also concluded that Linux mainstream adoption "continues unabated." Linux penetration, it found, was up 9% in the last 18 months; only 41% of the folks it surveyed weren't running any Linux file and print servers. Otherwise 55% said that 80%-100% of their servers are running Windows; 3% said they had no Windows installed.

On the Linux side 38% said up to 20% of their servers were running Linux; 28% had no Linux at all; 53% had no Linux e-mail or messaging servers and 46% don't use Linux for database.