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Open Source: Half of Organizations Say OS provides Them Competitive Advantage
Primary reasons for many organizations to adopt Open Source software has been lower cost and easier accessibility to source code to enable tighter customization and control. Now many organizations are citing yet another reason: competitive advantage. Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner, says that “gaining a competitive advantage has emerged as a significant reason for adopting an OSS solution, suggesting that users are beginning to look at OSS differently – they can customise the code to make it unique to their company, they have created a competitive advantage. ”
The Gartner survey found that now more than half of organizations feel that Open Source provides them competitive advantage. “Although a search for reducing costs by adopting OSS continues to be a major driver, with this survey we see more respondents looking at OSS as having much-greater value than simply getting something for free,” said Wurster.
Bob Igou, Gartner researcher and co-author of the Gartner report, commented that “OSS components and building blocks are utilized together with internally developed software to augment and enhance existing systems through integration and automation, as well as to improve business efficiencies and security.” Over the last five years, companies have become much more savvy and learnt how to integrate Open Source components with proprietary software components so as not to infringe on software licensing restrictions.
The Gartner report found that the use of Open Source software to be pervasive. 22 percent of organizations say that they use Open Source in all parts of their business and another 46 say that they have selectively deployed Open Source for specific departments and projects in their organization. By the end of 2012, Gartner reports that on average, Open Source software will account for 30 percent of most organization’s total software assets — compared to just five years ago when less than 10 percent of software assets were Open Source. 24 percent of organizations say that the selection of Open Source software was a strategic business decision for them. Another 31 percent said that the decision to use Open Source was a strategic decision made by their IT groups.
