OStatic

Training: The Missing Link in Business Adoption of Open Source?

When we recently covered the results from North Bridge Partners' survey on the future of open source, I was struck by an answer that the majority of respondents gave to this question: "What do you see as the key barrier to open source adoption in business?" The most popular answer to that question was "unfamiliarity with open source solutions." The question was asked in an open-ended way, so I assume that some people giving that answer are probably unfamiliar with the actual existence of open source software that could benefit them, and others are aware of the existence of the software, but don't know how to use the applications.

That last branch of the problem implies that training is more important than many providers of commercial open source offerings think it is. Today, I've been looking at the market research results from IDC's annual Worldwide IT Education and Training Vendor Analysis Study. (PDF) In it, Red Hat is named the commercial software provider that does training and education best. Here are some important reasons for that finding.

IDC's study looked at more proprietary software companies than open source ones. The companies studied included Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, HP, Sun, Symantec, Cisco and Red Hat. The study gets very specific about why Red Hat's training was deemed to be best of the bunch:

"Red Hat is the IDC MarketScape leader for IT education. Consistent with Red Hat's perception that training is a wedge to achieve broader adoption of its offerings, training is available for each release and is updated for every dot release. Uniquely, Red Hat offers broad release of most training during the beta-test phase of its product release cycle, facilitating user and professional services community input into the quality and format of its training offering. Because of its community-oriented product development, Red Hat is particularly collaborative in its training development and evaluation."

That sounds like a good menu of training choices for any commercial software company to follow, and particularly for commercial open source companies to follow. I don't doubt that this has a lot to do with Red Hat's success. If "unfamiliarity with open source" is indeed a huge barrier to business adoption of it, following best practices in training makes a lot of sense.

As a final point on this note, take a look at the chart from IDC below, which is based on survey results of IT professionals. "Skill of the team" is rated as the most important contributor to successful IT functions, far, far ahead of other factors, including "Effort of the team." There again, training has to matter--a lot.



 

• Red Hat
• IDC
• training

by Peter Brook on Apr. 15, 2009

Training is one aspect. It is just the general lack of knowledge about tools that are out there that could help companies that they just don't know about. Pretty much every major area today has a couple of solid Open Source projects. Info on what those projects are are difficult to find.

0 Votes

by fsd on Jun. 30, 2009

I liked this text and i appreciated. I've read all. When i was surfing izlesene, i watched a video about this text. Also i have a membership of a facebook group about this fact. Thanks the writer. I am always following texts like this.

Have a nice day.

0 Votes

by dsa on Jul. 29, 2009

I liked this text and i appreciated. I've read all. When i was surfing izlesene, i watched a video about this text. Also i have a membership of a facebook group about this fact. Thanks the writer. I am always following texts like this.

Have a nice day.

0 Votes

Share Your Comments