While reducing costs remains a primary factor for adopting open-source software, businesses are increasingly seeing it as a way to gain a competitive advantage, according to a new Gartner survey.
Companies are increasingly adopting open-source software as a way to gain
competitive advantage rather than just a cost-savings measure, according to the
results of a Gartner survey released Feb. 8.
The survey of 547 companies in 11 countries conducted between July and
August 2010 found that more than half of the IT executives said they are using
open source in both non-mission-critical and mission-critical environments.
Gaining a competitive advantage is a "significant reason" for
selecting an open-source product, said Laurie Wurster, research director at
Gartner. More organizations consider open source as "having much greater
value than simply getting something for free," she said.
The use of open source is pretty widespread within these organizations.
Nearly 46 percent of organizations have deployed open-source applications for
specific departments and projects and 22 percent of the surveyed businesses use
open source consistently across all departments, Gartner said. About 21 percent
of the executives said they were evaluating open-source products, according to
the report.
Open-source software has long been used for
basic
infrastructure, but organizations are now using it to build better software
to support core business activities, such as data management and integration,
application development, business process improvement, security, compliance,
data center modernization, and virtualization, Gartner said.
Nearly a quarter of respondents, 24 percent, said open-source adoption was
part of a strategic business decision, while 31 percent said it is part of the
company's IT strategy, the report found. Other reasons for selecting open-source
programs included the maturity of applications and total cost of ownership,
according to the report.
While lower cost of ownership remained a major factor, at 29 percent, nearly
one-third of executives cited flexibility, increased innovation, shorter
development and faster procurement as reasons for picking open source over
proprietary software, according to Gartner analysts. Some common
open-source
products in the enterprise include SugarCRM, Zimbra and OpenOffice.
The rate of adoption amongst responding organizations has increased each
year, according to analysts. Five years ago, less than 10 percent of responding
organizations said they were using open source, Gartner said. The amount of
proprietary
software within the organization decreased at about the same rate open-source
usage increased over the past five years, the survey found. Organizations also
have more internally developed software, the analysts found.
Companies are using open-source applications and add-ons with internally
developed software to improve business efficiencies and security, said Bob
Igou, research director at Gartner. The report found most businesses use
commercial and open-source software side by side.
Companies are
customizing
the code to meet their individual needs instead of paying a commercial software
vendor, Wurster said. Open-source software may be used in conjunction with
internally built software instead of completely replacing proprietary software,
the analysts speculated.
"With greater in-depth understanding and access to the necessary skill
sets, end-user organizations will continue to find new deployment of OSS,"
Wurster said.
Even with an increased number of open-source applications within the
organization, only one-third of the companies had a formal open-source policy
in place, the analysts found. The remaining companies were using the software
on an ad-hoc basis.
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