Brighton (UK), November 2009 - The current recession has tightened spending belts of organisations the world over, and most software and services companies feel the pinch. But open source companies appear to be bucking the trend - many exhibited strong growth throughout 2008 and 2009 Q1. Kineo's "Market watch" has this to say: A recent Economist article caught the zeitgeist with the headline "Open-source software firms are flourishing", and there's been an increase in open source success stories in the media the past few months.
While it's nice to think that large swathes of tech journalists are suddenly supporting open source, much of the reason for all this good press can be attributed to a number of positive research reports from the likes of IDC and Gartner. These industry analysts have been busy investigating open source adoption over the past year and have been publishing interesting results.
As long ago as June 2008, Gartner surveyed 274 enterprise companies globally and found that 85% had already adopted open source, with most of the remaining 15 percent expecting to do so within the next year. Forrester's April 2009 report "Open Source Software Goes Mainstream" questioned 2000 software decision makers. The report concluded that open source has risen to the top of the executive agenda, with the author noting that "the mandate's coming from higher up".
This is a major change for open source, which historically has entered organisations from below the executive radar using a bottom-up approach. It was likely deployed by IT and programming teams, gradually gaining traction through the organisation, and often becoming widespread before the CIO even knew it existed.
The other big news in open source adoption has been in the move 'up the stack' into applications. Open source has gained massive popularity in server software in the past decade but is increasingly moving into end-user applications.
An October 2008 study by Forrester interviewed 132 senior business and IT executives from large companies in Europe that are already using open source products. They found that 45% of all companies that are leveraging open source use it for mission-critical applications. More interestingly, they found that while open source infrastructure adoption was widespread, there was a much larger and longer- term opportunity for open source applications in productivity tools, messaging / groupware, ERP, Business Intelligence, CRM, and Content Management.
Open source company results
Kineo took a look around the industry and picked some of the highlights from the 2009 Q1 open source company reports.
