Bangalore: Since July 2011 Ubuntu is soaring in demand and has overtaken Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for web servers, claims Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu on the basis of a report by W3Tech which surveys technologies used on the Web. When it comes to Linux Desktop, Ubuntu is undoubtedly the most popular choice today and certainly the biggest player in Linux desktop.

Shuttleworth says that “A remarkable thing happened this year: companies started adopting Ubuntu over RHEL for large-scale enterprise workloads, in droves” reports Steven Nicholas in zdnet.com and according to W3Techs’ report during the first quarter of 2012 “Ubuntu is now used on 6% of all Web servers, up from 4% one year ago.”

Cloud Market is a firm that scans the Amazon EC2 cloud use and it reveals that Ubuntu is the most popular and is the top operating system with almost 12-thousand instances. Second comes the generic linux with some thousands, windows lagged much behind and is at the third position with 3,58-thousand instances and the Red Hat with its clone CentOS has 2.3-thousand instances, clearly these figures show that Ubuntu images are a huge hit and most famous OS images on the Amazon cloud.

The question that arises here is that why are people preferring Ubuntu for servers? To answer this Shuttleworth wrote in one his blog, “The key driver of this has been that we added quality as a top-level goal across the teams that build Ubuntu – both Canonical’s and the community’s. We also have retained the focus on keeping the up-to-date tools available on Ubuntu for developers, and on delivering a great experience in the cloud, where computing is headed.”

Finally the big question, is Ubuntu competitive enough to takeover RHEL? Nicholas says that Ubuntu is establishing itself and setting a strong base as a web server but its not reached Red Hat’s level yet. Red Hat is counted as the first pure- play linux and open source company with a good revenue of a billion.  Shuttleworth used Ubutu web servers to claim that is can overtake Red Hat but the fact is that the servers that Shuttleworth used to claim are edge servers and not really enterprise servers as such.