Asking the wrong questions on open-source adoption
It used to make sense to talk about open source as a separate line item in the enterprise IT lexicon. However, open source has become such a standard way of delivering enterprise IT that maybe it's time to update the lexicon. It no longer makes sense to ask CIOs whether they plan to "deploy open source" as if it's somehow a separate and distinct question from, say, "Do you plan to deploy new database servers?" The questions are largely one and the same.
Apparently Baseline didn't get the memo though a few weeks ago it carried an article talking about how pervasive open source has become in enterprise IT. On Monday, Baseline published the annual "CIO Insight's 2009 IT Spending," and makes the mistake of treating open source as a separate entity:
Top IT spending priorities for 2009
(Credit: Baseline Magazine)That doesn't look very good for open source, but the real data is almost certainly buried in the answers given to other questions.
According to the survey, 70 percent of chief information officers surveyed plan to spend money on database software, with the 2009 budget for such spending set to rise by 4 percent. Forty percent are budgeting for corporate portals, 33 percent for ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, and so on. I'm willing to bet that a rising share of this spending includes open-source software, though it may not be called out as such.
Why am I so sanguine? Because I live in this market. One anecdotal example among many: a large financial services company with which I had talked two years ago called me last Friday. The enterprise architect told me that while two years ago open source was deemed too risky for his company to implement, today "wasting money on expensive, proprietary software is considered a career-limiting move, and open source is now in the driver's seat on a range of new projects."
The risk profile had changed, and open source is now considered a great way to de-risk IT investment.
When the ultimate decision is made, however, it won't be because the software is open source. It will be because the software has the right functionality, ease-of-use, and performance at the right price. The CIO won't buy it because it's open source. She'll buy it because it works.
It's time to stop calling out open source as a separate line item in these surveys. IT budgets don't do so, so why should surveys? CIOs are voting for the effects of open source in their IT environments, regardless of whether it's called out. Open source is furniture now: everyone has it, but perhaps they don't think about it.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
- by fazalmajid March 3, 2009 10:54 AM PST
- Most of the time CIOs are not even aware of all the open-source deployments going on. Since initial deployments use the free-as-in-beer versions, they do not require budgetary approval and all the control-freak bureaucracy that comes with it, and fly under the radar, so to speak. Of course, CIOs hate that.
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- by grussak March 4, 2009 11:00 AM PST
- There's a very good reason that CIOs hate open source - it's called business.
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- by pentest March 4, 2009 12:12 PM PST
- Grussak,
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(3 Comments)Open source only makes sense to people with lots of technical savvy and not so much business savvy. There are no free lunches in this world - something business people understand all too well and the technical types seldom do.
I'm not surprised that someone with your background, Mr. Asay, would feel as if open source should get equal standing in surveys or budgets alongside commercial software, but saying it doesn't make it so. There's a good reason that open source, after all these years, is still reduced to anecdotal stories and blatant assumptions about adoption rates hidden somewhere deep beneath real survey data.....it's not viable for true commercial operations. Business people know that; otherwise, RedHat would already be the new Microsoft and Sun would have set in favor of Apache years ago.
So here's a toast to all the entrepreneurs who start, build and grow software companies with the reasonable expectation that if the product solves problems and has value it's worth charging money for it. Here's to those same people who then take that money to create jobs that, among other things, feed and clothe and house the technical people and their families who think it's cool to go open source so they don't have to pay "the man" anything for software.
A lot of unfounded comments.
Don't you realize that OSS is a multi-billion dollar business and few corporations do not use it.
Even MS uses it.
What about OSS requres technical savvy? Some specific applications do, but guess so do the proprietary counterparts and the people who use it are going to be technical anyway.
Linux, openoffice, mediawiki, etc, etc, etc take no technical savviness at all to use.