IDC's Matt Lawton recently released a new report about open source adoption:
"However, project vendors, project partners, and vendor partners need to step up and provide support and attendant services in order to move the adoption of OSS from early adopters to the mainstream. Only 12% of all projects are supported by a commercial software vendor, and, incredibly, less than 1% of the projects have attendant services sourced from service providers."
Taken from Matt Lawton. "2007 Industry Adoption of Open Source Software, Part 2: Project Adoption" Oct 2007 Doc #209052, IDC.
Wow! Open source is in the enterprise, and only 1% of those off-the-shelf software components have attendant services for them? Aren't we all supposed not to deploy software if we don't have "the throat to choke" in our hands?
Matt Lawton certainly is shocked and worries about the future of open source.
Always up for a good argument, Matt Asay begs to differ. He writes:
"In other words, these projects weren't simply casual afterthoughts that didn't require outside help. They were perhaps some of the most important IT projects the enterprise was deploying. Those may be best kept in-house."
His argument is that the best support for mission-critical open source application is in-house support, and that open source liberates companies to provide this support themselves.
Which surprises me. I'm not sure I'm buying that IT departments love to get into the support business, in particular, if it isn't their own application. At SAP, together with our partners, we certainly are trying to make life as easy as possible for our customers, and not pile on new responsibilities.
But open source is just at the beginning, and the business models are still evolving.
Stay tuned for the next entry in this blog on open source (research) and the industry.
