The 2007 economy is clearly not looking good. It is showing signs of experiencing the slowest growth in five years and the forecasters are predicting sluggishness for next year at around a 2.8 percent growth. As our economy slows, many predict cut backs in the overall IT budgets for next year. Looking to lower its costs, I predict that IT will be taking a serious look at ramping the use of more and more open source software in order to help reduce costs. With many years of success using Linux and other core open source solutions, enterprises are becoming more and more comfortable with replacing expensive proprietary and closed solutions with their open source equivalents at a much lower costs and with higher reliability and quality. This should be good news for established open source companies in addition to emerging open source based businesses such as EnterpriseDB, MuleSource, Talend, Pentaho, Cleversafe.
Although costs will be a driving force behind an accelerated adoption of open source, other factors including proven reliability, flexibility, openness, continuous innovation and excellent customer service and support will help overcome any previous hesitations with going down the open source road.
Yes as long as the Open Source software has good support, strong community, and fast bug resolution most companies will happy to take the risk.
Given the increasing appearance of the Enterprise Edition vs Community Edition, this is the big Open Source vendors response to Business requiring some form of legitimacy and I suppose accountability especially in the US with the Sarbane-Oxley (SOX) laws.
Posted by: Paul | September 16, 2007 at 06:49 AM