Alfresco Releases Results of its Open Source Barometer Survey

by Sam Dean - Nov. 11, 2008Comments (1)

Alfresco Software, which makes open source enterprise content management software, is out with the results of its third global survey of trends in enterprise open source usage. The Alfresco Open Source Barometer survey went to 25,000 Alfresco community members between April and September. It consists of questions about open source infrastructure and software stacks at enterprises. There are some interesting findings, including wariness toward Microsoft's Silverlight, and friendliness toward Java, AJAX and Web 2.0 offerings.

We've written before about Alfresco adding SharePoint interoperability. SharePoint is Microsoft's application for online content sharing and collaboration, and Alfresco was able to add interoperability with it due to European Union mandates on Microsoft to open up aspects of the Microsoft Office interfaces.

According to Dr. Ian Howells, Chief Marketing Officer at Alfresco:

"One of the survey’s goals was to examine the impact of SharePoint on the open source ECM market. This survey drilled down further, examining specifically the Windows subset. The majority of open source users evaluate on Windows but 86% do not use .NET/Web Parts and 95% do not use Silverlight. The survey found that over 50% of respondents use a Java architecture and AJAX. One conclusion is Windows respondents are looking for an open source alternative to SharePoint and want a Java architecture. This further demonstrates how organizations are increasingly using a mixed open source and proprietary environment.”

As has been found in past surveys from Alfresco, in open source enterprise content management environments, Red Hat and Ubuntu are the operating system leaders. More surprisingly, the survey found that among application servers in use in open source enterprise environments, Apache Tomcat completely dominates at 67% usage, compared to only 15% usage of JBoss--further evidence of how you can never count Apache out. You can view the full results of Alfresco's survey in this Slideshare presentation here.