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The Enterprise IT Revolution: OS Gains Momentum Across Enterprises
Open Source is having a profound affect on Enterprise IT. In the early days of Open Source worries around support, scalability, reliability, security, and IP kept most Enterprise customers away from even seriously considering Open Source. While many of those issues haven’t totally gone away, a growing number of Open Source projects are proving that they can successfully compete against their commercial counterparts checkbox-by-checkbox on customer requirements lists. And as IT budgets become increasingly tighter, Open Source options become very attractive.
Companies like Amazon and Google have proved that hugely successful software-intensive companies can be built from Open Source components, and those companies in turn are serving as models for the IT operations used by many startups and large organizations. Forrester Research’s Jeffrey Hammond said that Open Source has finally managed to “cross the chasm” and is winning support among Enterprise IT groups. That does seem to be very true. Survey results released in August 2010 by Zenoss found that 98 percent of enterprises are using Open Source for some aspect of their business, and 78 percent of system administrators said that they would prefer to use Open Source over comparable commercial software.
But Open Source still comes with a set of challenges. Two of the main challenges are picking the right software components and finding the right people who can then support you. But those are really two problems that need to be solved whether you select Open Source or commercial software.
There are resources which exist that help organizations locate Open Source projects that fit the profile for the software that they are looking for. Most notable is Black Duck Software. The company provides resources to help evaluate the vitality and sustainability of Open Source projects. Black Duck operates the site Koders.com and recently acquired and is merging with a similar on-line resource called Ohloh.net.
