A Phenomenal Growth

Nothing will slow the progress and increased adoption of open software. What was traditionally viewed as developer and infrastructure tools has quickly infiltrated the enterprise environment.

According to a recent study by IDC, the open source software market generated $1.8 billion in 2006. This real explosion of companies involved (see further down) should make the market reach $5.8 billion in 2011 according to IDC, which means a 26 percent compound annual growth rate.

The public sector was one of the first to initiate the trend: 400,000 workstations in the French government have already been migrated to OpenOffice. Other players of the public sector have also started to switch to open source software technologies: in the United States (University of Nebraska, Colorado Department of Human Services, City of Chicago, etc.), in France (National Gendarmerie, Ministry of Finance, etc.) and the rest of the world (Cities of Munich and Amsterdam, Swedish National Police, schools in Russia and Venezuela; etc.). Even if, according to a study by the University of Maastricht, contributions and innovations are mainly European (70 percent of open source developers are based in Europe), the US has the highest usage rate within enterprises and government agencies.

Open Source on Every Floor!

We already know that open source software is widely present within companies' infrastructures: security (firewall, IPS-IDS, sniffer, proxy, antivirus, anti-spam etc.), operating systems (workstations, network, scientific computers, etc.), databases and Web browsers. Today, open source technology can also be found in the lower layers of companies' or government agencies' information systems.

Increasingly it is also deployed in the higher layers (business applications) as well as the middleware layers (non visible by the user).

In summary, five open source segments are particularly appreciated in the business world: enterprise applications (office automation, management, CRM, content management, Business Intelligence); departmental and group applications (collaboration, project management); Web servers and application server software (Enterprise Server Bus, integration server, portals); databases and operating systems.

2007: Offerings are Maturing

The growing presence of open source software at the application level illustrates the greater maturity of the offerings. Adopting organizations select open source solutions because of the competitive advantage it delivers. Some initial findings demonstrate some clear cut advantages for making this decision.