Strategic Planning In Enterprises To Boost Open Source Adoption

Open source applications have come a long way. A few years ago, it would have been difficult to find more than a handful of CIOs who viewed open source as a dependable solution for their company. However, CIOs are now increasingly looking at open source as an alternative to some proprietary offerings.

Although, open source applications can be found in almost all enterprises, their use in business critical applications is still debatable. Asheesh Raina, principal analyst, Software Industry, Asia Pacific, Gartner, speaks to Biztech 2.0 and clears the air surrounding open source usage in enterprises.

Over the past five years, how far do you think have enterprises adopted open source applications?

The open-source software (OSS) movement is having an increasingly profound effect on the IT software industry as a whole. It has made considerable progress over the last 5 years in marking it’s presence in different sub-segments in different verticals of the enterprise. Enterprises now have teams for sculpting OSS strategies and budgets earmarked for current and future developments. The goal of the open-source movement is to maximise and protect the privileges of the user, rather than the author. Also, the adoption rate in application development tools has seen a significant rise world wide and in Asia Pacific as well. Many countries even have government funding for open source initiatives.

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What more is required from the open source community?

Some more standardisation, clarity and firm licensing policy are required for increased adoption. Gartner suggests that understanding the OSI’s (Open Source Initiative) open-source definition and the rights it entails is important to address consolidation and clarity.

OSS licenses vary dramatically. Some licenses may offer the same benefits of open source, even though they are not officially certified by the OSI as open source. Gartner recommends that these licenses must be carefully approached. They must be closely examined, with all the "fine print," and must be seriously questioned as to why they aren’t certified by the OSI.

Why don’t we see too many IT executives using open source for business critical applications?

This has less to do with the open-source nature of the applications and more to do with perceptions regarding code quality, support, and scalability issues. Also, the abundance of skill set and expertise discourages the usage of open source and its applications for business/mission critical applications.

Its adoption and usage is heavily weighted towards deployment, integration, support, educational and maintenance requirements, by the enterprises. However, it’s just a matter of time when we see wider adoption with some careful and strategic planning by large enterprises.

Do you see any Indian enterprises adopting business critical open source applications?

Yes, it is very likely in the near future. Most large enterprises have their own teams in place for seriously evaluating the usage of open source applications. We expect the usage of OSS applications by Indian enterprises to grow significantly very soon.

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What do you think is the future of open source applications?

During the next five years, Gartner predicts that open-source software products will directly compete with commercial products to displace license revenue from traditional markets, while expanding the overall market through inclusion of small and mid-size business customers and emerging service organisations.

However, Gartner survey for APAC has revealed that OSS is more commonly used to replace commercial software as a server operating system and database management system than for digital content creation, application integration and middleware, business process management, and extraction, transformation and loading. In light of this, we predict that digital content creation and application development will be the most important.

Do you think deals like Microsoft – Novell should be encouraged? What is the effect of such deals on enterprises?

This alliance should be treated like any other business model of convenience and not as a social movement which requires encouragement or discouragement from the masses. These alliances are primarily driven by market requirement, big prospective deals and ideology of the organisations involved in it. Microsoft recognises and realises that customers today are deploying mixed source solutions (Windows and Linux) and want these solutions to work well together. This will help Microsoft by making it easier for Linux customers to deploy Windows in their Linux environments and vice versa.

Microsoft is committing significant resources to promote joint Windows-Linux solutions. This is all about co-existence and giving customers greater choice. The end users stand to gain in terms of flexibility, choice and issues surrounding the workable solutions ownership.