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A study conducted by Forrester Consulting revealed that customers use open source for
mission-critical applications, but showed concern about the availability of services to
unlock the full value of open source solutions
Tespondents 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, conducted the international commissioned study,
for Unisys Corporation.
The majority of respondents to the study used 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.
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.
71 percent respondants viewed open source software 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.
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.
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