Enterprise Adoption of Open Source Steams Ahead

by Sam Dean - Dec. 01, 2008Comments (4)

This week brings some interesting new reports on open source adoption in enterprises, providing more evidence that the economic downturn is boosting many open source product categories. BusinessWeek has a big story out on cost-conscious companies turning to open source, ranging from ETrade to the Los Angeles Times. Meanwhile, new survey results illustrate a trend we've written about before: open source moving up the software stack in enterprises.

BusinessWeek's story includes quite a few open source success stories at well-known companies. Among the citations:

 

  • Between 2001 and 2002, ETrade was able to cut $13 million a year from its tech spending by switching to open source software.
  • H&R Block, Men's Wearhouse, and Shinsei Bank are all now paying customers of SugarCRM, which posted record revenue in the third quarter.
  • A September Gartner study finds that about 52 percent of enterprises surveyed are using open-source server software and another 23 percent plan to use it within the next 12 months.
  • Office Depot has been steadily moving from IBM and Sun solutions to running Linux on its servers, with about 400 servers running Linux software from Novell.
  • The Los Angeles Times has been steadily aggregating collections of images and video using Alfresco's enterprise content management system.

 

Of course, these are just snapshots, but all of these are also cases where the  open source offerings are directly competitive with proprietary alternatives. Meanwhile, in conjunction with the Open World Forum, Bull Services is out with survey results from a commissioned study it did with Forrester Consulting.

The survey results show open source being adopted for productivity tools and core business applications. "An increasing percentage of the surveyed companies... adopted open source CRM (31%), BI (33%) and ERP systems (38%)," the survey found. Seventy percent of survey respondents also said that their positive experiences with open source would cause them to increase its use in the future.

The Bull Services survey is a commissioned one, and I always take results from these with a grain of salt, but the results line up well with findings from Gartner, The 451 Group and others. As we head into 2009, look for open source adoption to increase at the enterprise level.


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Dawn Giorgio uses OStatic to support Open Source, ask and answer questions and stay informed. What about you?



4 Comments
 

SharePoint is the great platform for enterprise document management and collaboration, and the integration application on SharePoint lets organisations to keep IT platform up with their business development and requirement in the future. nSynergy assist here as we specialise in developing and implementing SharePoint – that's all we do.

For more information about SharePoint and nSynergy, you can visit http://www.nsynergy.com.


0 Votes

Microsoft's Sharepoint is a great product if you're

a) spending other people's money (e.g. taxpayers) because it costs a not-so-small fortune (no one gets a working solution "out-of-the-box"), and

b) don't have enough in-house skills to use a solution like Alfresco or Drupal.


I believe time (and the market) will show that smart organisations go open source.


Dave


0 Votes

"I believe time (and the market) will show that smart organisations go open source."


What did you expect? The market is down 60%. Companies will cut back and downsize (and go Open Source), but many will also simply hold out for some sort of market recovery.


Don't count out the Microsofts and Oracles of the world - simply look at their stock prices relative to NOVL and RHT - both of which have underperformed MSFT and ORCL in the last 3 years. So the "smart" argument doesn't exactly hold here. Now think about what an ORCL purchase of RHT could do to the ecosystem (after all, RHAT is chump change for Larry and Co.)


0 Votes

Why based your business' future success on the strength of a totally independent corporation if you can base it on a community that has no single point of failure... I don't really see what the stock values of those companies have to do with anything... Open source software has the pleasant side effect of making the software corporates superfluous to the equation. Why not look for coordinated networks of local independent vendors who have a much bigger financial incentive to work for *your* business. The days of the software corporates are ending - originally, corporations evolved to

1. guarantee access to raw materials,

2. establish distribution channels, and

3. acquire and distribute the huge capital required for old-school manufacturing...


I think you can see that the largely anonymous (well, except for Google maybe) internet does away with the need for 1-3 in the case of software... I think it's just taking a while for the market to come to terms with that. I'd say we're nearing the cusp of that.


0 Votes
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