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Mumbai
May 15th, 2007
Respondents in a study of European and North American companies that had
evaluated or are using open source software see enough business benefit from
open source to use it for applications critical to their business in key areas
such as driving revenue and enhancing customer service. Forrester Consulting, a
leading provider of technology and market research, conducted the international
commissioned study, for Unisys Corporation.
The majority of respondents to the study also use open source for
mission-critical applications, but showed concern about the availability of
services to unlock the full value of open source solutions. The respondents
viewed open source software as capable of delivering significant business
payback, especially by lowering their companies' overall operating costs.
While 62 percent of respondents stated that being able to use the software
without paying a license fee made open source attractive, nearly 80 percent
cited factors as support for open standards, use of code without restrictions
and avoidance of lock-in to a single vendor. More than half of the respondents -
58 percent in North America and 51 percent in the UK and Continental Europe -
stated that they use open source software for mission-critical applications.
More than 79 percent report using open source in the application
infrastructure - in databases, Web servers and application servers. In fact, 77
percent of the study respondents called open source important or very important
for improving IT efficiency and delivering more with less.
A large majority of respondents also saw open source software as a major
vehicle for key IT initiatives such as modernizing their enterprise application
environments. 71percent viewed it as important or very important for
consolidating IT infrastructure. In addition, 57 percent of the respondents
characterized open source as important or very important for facilitating the
migration to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
According to Forrester, open source software's support for open standards was
a major factor driving their view of its value for SOA next-generation
enterprise architectures. Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of the respondents
to the survey expressed concern about the availability of consulting,
integration, support and other services for open source software.
More than two thirds of the respondents expected life cycle support (80
percent); integration of multiple open source software components (76 percent);
and open source application development (72 percent) from their open source
service provider. Page(s) 1
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