The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), which has contributed an ebizQ feature article here, sponsored a series of focus groups during 2007 with some interesting results. The focus groups, which the OSA called forums probably because they did not meet market-research criteria needed to provide statistically significant results, provided an opportunity for OSA customers in five different cities in North America and Europe to share best practices with others and for the OSA to learn what the most important issues are among open source software (OSS) customers going into 2008. More than 100 customers, including integrators and vendor partners, attended. All content has been published to the OSA community site and can he found here.
The findings, consistent with my own research, are overwhelmingly pro open-choice.
The OSA says it heard that commercial OSS solutions are being broadly adopted but that challenges--interoperability stands out as a key issue--remain. Consequently, the OSA plans to focus its efforts in 2008 on addressing the interoperability issues deemed most important by the forum attendees. Read that as "we've got to get along with Microsoft." Over 50% said they needed to make an OSS solution run on Windows or integrate with other Microsoft products such as the Internet Information Services (IIS) web server, ActiveDirectory or Sharepoint.
In addition, consistent with our research, few customers value OSS because they can change the code to meet their requirements. Most instead preferred the code to meet their requirements as-is, so they could minimize support and development costs. We still believe the OSS terms and conditions related to the ability to change code are important to users if a community dissolves or a commercial sponsor stops providing support.
The OSA asked customers how important OSS definitions and Open Source Initiative (OSI)-compliant licenses were. Other than the advantage noted above, most said other elements of the definition were not part of their buying criteria. Vendors and integrators, however, were more likely to say this was important because of redistribution obligations.
Additionally, larger enterprises also consistently raised business process orchestration (BPO) and production management and monitoring as important issues. I am researching OSS BPO in December 2007 and will publish a synopsis of my research here in January 2008. Per our upcoming 2007 look-back/2008 look-ahead research, large enterprises recognize more value in OSS because they have more IT resources to manage support, maintenance and integration issues themselves. Many IT directors in larger enterprises simply say "go do it." The path into the small and medium businesses, according to OSA, depends on ensuring that OSS products are already maintainable and interoperable out of the box.
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