Survey: Half Of Enterprise Software Will Be Open Source Within Five Years

A survey being released today at an open source conference in San Francisco shows that 56 percent of respondents predict that more than half of the software purchases made by businesses and other enterprises over the next five years will be of open source software. The organizers of the Open Source Business Conference 2011 say that this is because customers have overcome their reluctance toward using open source, such as concerns about licenses, and are embracing its virtues, such as flexibility, lower cost and avoiding vendor lock-in. The survey also identifies growth opportunities for open source in the software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing and mobile markets, which are growth areas for IT in general.

Open source vendors have long hyped the idea that open source is going "mainstream," but in this year's survey 60 percent of the respondents are end users, which means that users are acknowledging that, too, said Michael Skok, conference chairman and a general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, which conducted the survey.

This is the fifth annual survey for OSBC. Skok notes that six years ago, CIOs and IT staff "didn't understand what open source was or how to deal with it." At the same time, vendors weren't prepared to answer their questions.

Today, user confidence in open source is strong, and earlier concerns about complicated open source licensing or company policies against open source are no longer relevant, he says. "People were scared that they'd have things like code leakage or copyright violations. That's not coming up at all," Skok says.

In this survey, for the first time, the No. 1advantage respondents see to open source is avoiding software vendor lock-in, which replaced lower costs, the previous No. 1 advantage. The No. 2 advantage is lower costs compared with licensed software, and No. 3 is flexibility.At a panel scheduled for Monday morning, a representative of the investment firm JPMorgan Chase was expected to detail how that firm uses open source. "Virtually every project they do has open source now," Skok says.

Open source is now being embraced in both the public and private sectors, and a tipping point for open source acceptance in the public sector came in 2009, when the White House said it would begin using open source, Skok says. The website www.whitehouse.gov is built on Drupal, the open source project for content management systems. Acquia, a commercial Drupal-based software company, is funded by North Bridge.

The survey also revealed that software vendors aren't spending as much time educating customers on what open source is, but are now focused on support, product management, feature functionality and return on investment, which are the same focus areas for licensed software vendors. Vendors are also pursuing growing opportunities for open source delivered in a SaaS model, as part of a cloud computing stack, or in mobile devices, which are growth areas for IT in general.

A 2010 survey by the open source firm Black Duck Software identified 3,800 open source projects for mobile computing--including tablet computers and smartphones--which is double the number of mobile projects identified in the 2009 survey. 

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