For a long time now, the sluggish economy has helped boost adoption of open source in the enterprise, even as some IT administrators find themselves struggling with open source deployments and security issues. OpenLogic has remained a leading provider of open source platforms and applications that it certifies, providing many of these administrators with an added level of trust in open source. Now, the company has just reported strong growth for its business in 2011, and OpenLogic has also recently put out some trending reports on how open source solutions are faring.
While OpenLogic doesn't break out its revenues and earnings, the company's annual summary for 2011 highlighted strong growth, and in particular:
"... record-breaking sales in each quarter, including the company's largest-ever quarter in Q4 2011, which was up 45% over the previous year."
The statement added:
"In 2011 OpenLogic's client base grew to more than 300 enterprise customers worldwide. New customers helped fuel the company's record growth, as did existing customers who bought additional software and services, more than doubling expansion business over 2010. Overall, 70% of OpenLogic's business continues to come from Global 2000 enterprises, although in 2011 OpenLogic saw the fastest growth from government and mid-market companies. The US market led in customer growth, followed by Asia Pacific, while EMEA showed the largest increases in average deal size."
OpenLogic offers training services for enterprises interested in open source deployments, and an online exchange called OLEX where enterprises can get certified distributions of open source platforms and applications. Its Wazi site is also very popular in the open source community. Through the training services, adminstrators can learn about clustering, PostgreSQL and MySQL administration, and much more.
The company also has its finger on the pulse of which open source platforms and applications are trending upward among business users. According to the company's latest data, the three top industries making increasing use of open source are: Manufacturing, Government and Media. OpenLogic also recently announced the top gainers and losers among open source projects in 2011 (based on surveys with enterprise customers), with HBase, Node.js, and nginx topping the list of gainers. Hadoop and Rails were also top gainers.
Open source is becoming ever more widely used in enterprises, not just in terms of fully realized applications and platforms, but in terms of components. In fact, if you factor in components, some predict that 100 percent of enterprises will soon run one form of open source software or another. It won't be a surprise to see other firms like OpenLogic take shape, offering services, certification, training and more to enterprises that want to incorporate open source.
