The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Open Source: Enterprises Embrace Open Source to Avoid Vendor Lock-In
While many companies look to Open Source to help them reduce costs, the main reason that organizations now cite for why they are adopting Open Source is thatthey are trying to avoid vendor lock-in. As many as 95 percent of organizations using Open Source say that avoiding vendor lock-in was the main reason why they chose it. Those results are from the 2011 Future of Open Source Survey sponsored by North Bridge Venture Partners.
The survey found that Open Source is increasingly used in both public and private sectors. Organizations have become much more confident in the capabilities and robustness of Open Source, and the cloud that hung over Open Source licensing issues for years seems to have cleared. Michael Skok, general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, said that “The results of this year’s survey clearly demonstrate that open source has gone mainstream not just within the vendor community, but within customer organizations of all types and sizes.”
The report found that the two areas where Open Source tools and applications are seeing the greatest interest is with SaaS and mobility. The report counted the launch of more than 3800 mobile Open Source projects in 2010, more than double the number from 2009. In the area of cloud computing, there were 410 new projects.
Drivers for the interest in Open Source include the following:
- Desire to avoid vendor lock-in — both from traditional software vendors and also from cloud vendors
- Desire to reduce costs
- Greater flexibility
- Previous successes with Open Source
In some organizations, Open Source has become the primary source of the software being used. 25 percent of organizations say now that more than three quarters of the software that they use is Open Source. And 56 percent say that by the end of the next five years that they expect more than half of the software that they will use will be Open Source.
