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July 28, 2008

According to OSA (the Open Solutions Alliance) the results of a new survey reveal that the current weak economy is leading more organizations to adopt the Linux operating system and various open-source software to save on licensing fees. Also, some companies are worried about interoperability between open-source software and Windows applications.

In a survey of about 110 of its member organizations, the OSA found that an overall 83 percent said that this year, they expect to see a year-over-year increase in revenue from open-source related software and services.

Dominic Sartorio, senior director of product management for SpikeSource said “we are seeing that the market for commercial open source software and services is growing rather rapidly. And I see the economy contributing to that because of the cost.”

Sartorio also happens to be the CEO of OSA, and he adds that about 78 percent reported that the affordable price of open-source software is motivating their customers.

He said the survey also showed that open-source companies are really serious about collaboration. Nearly all respondents said they have active partnerships with other open-source software vendors. In addition, the average survey participant had no less than ten such partnerships, he said.

OSA's report also showed that 84.8 percent of the companies polled said they sell open-source products or services that run on Microsoft Windows or otherwise interoperate with Microsoft products.

“We knew that collaboration was important to open source companies, but this statistic was surprising,” Sartorio said.

Anthony Gold, v.p. and general manager for the open-source division at Unisys and OSA board member said “Microsoft certainly is an important partner to numerous open-source companies and will continue to be more so moving forward. Enterprises need to maximize their IT resources and many realize that a hybrid Microsoft-open source environment can be the best option for their specific requirements."

Meanwhile, 56 percent of survey participants said their customers were concerned about interoperability between open-source applications, and 79 percent said their customers were concerned about interoperability between open-source and proprietary solutions.

Prepared in late June, the OSA’s Open Source Market Survey covered a number of topics of interest to the open-source and Linux community. Other key findings include that most open-source companies surveyed have operations outside the U.S. and of those, about 57.9 percent say they see more widespread open source-adoption outside the United States.

The OSA released the findings of its survey at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore., which ran July 21-25.

Overall, 71.9 percent of respondents said SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) is an important part of their business strategy.

Source: ITF.

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