By Elizabeth Kelleher
A new survey by Gartner has found that more than half of the 547 organisations it surveyed worldwide have adopted open-source software (OSS) solutions as part of their IT strategy.
Nearly one-third of respondents cited benefits of flexibility, increased innovation, shorter development times and faster procurement processes as reasons for adopting OSS solutions, but only one-third reported having a formal OSS policy in place.
The survey found that 22 per cent of respondents were adopting OSS solutions consistently in all departments of the company, while 46 per cent were utilising the approach in specific departments and projects.
Twenty-one per cent of respondents said they were in the process of evaluating the advantages of using OSS.
“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 — if they can customise the code to make it unique to their company, they have created a competitive advantage,” said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner.
“With greater in-depth understanding and access to the necessary skill sets, end-user organisations will continue to find new deployment of OSS,” said Wurster.
“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.”
According to Gartner, key initiatives supported by the use of OSS were data management and integration, application development, architecture, governance and/or overhaul.
Business process improvement or re-engineering, security, risk and/or compliance, Data centre modernisation and consolidation, and virtualisation, were also identified by respondents as initiatives supported by the use of OSS.
Bob Igou, research director at Gartner, said: “Based on these results, we see that OSS components and building blocks are utilised together with internally developed software to augment and enhance existing systems through integration and automation, as well as to improve business efficiencies and security.”
