Gartner: Open Source is pervasive

About 85 percent of all companies are already using open source; the other 15 percent will follow within the next twelve months. These are the findings of a survey carried out in early summer by market research firm Gartner, who polled 274 companies of various sizes from a variety of sectors in North America, Europe and the Pacific. The survey revealed that open source was particularly popular in the infrastructure sector, but that the number of free business-related applications was on the increase. On the whole, says Gartner, you are just as likely to find open source solutions in business-critical as in non-critical areas.

The three principle reasons for open source that Gartner found are lower software costs, lower development costs and easier start-up of new IT projects. Other reasons frequently mentioned are independence from a single software manufacturer and faster development processes. Customer service applications are the leading non-infrastructure workload for which open source software is used, followed by enterprise integration, finance and administration, and business analytics applications. The biggest problem with open source, according to Gartner, is the fact that nearly 70 percent of those surveyed have no explicit guidelines for the deployment of open source. The full Gartner report is available for $1295.

(djwm)