Forrester: 87% of Companies Save Money with Open Source Solutions
Forrester Research, a leading business intelligence company targeted at the Fortune 500, has done a number of interesting studies on the adoption, use, and response of open source software in the corporate IT environment. Cnet has just posted an article charting “open source sales” vs. the negative trending economy and quotes a poll taken by the company in 2008. In that survey, Forrester reported 87% of companies saved money with open source solutions and 92% felt that the open source application met or exceeded their quality expectations.
- “87 percent of those surveyed realized the cost savings they expected from open source;
- 92 percent of respondents have had their quality expectations met or exceeded by open-source software. (Try getting anywhere near that number with proprietary solutions);
- The manufacturing sector has been a primary adopter of open-source middleware, while financial services (at least, up until the meltdown) has been fastest off the starting blocks to go to open-source applications;
- Speaking of open-source applications, a significant percentage of the enterprises surveyed have adopted or will adopt the following open-source software within the next 12 months: CRM (67 percent), ESB (47 percent), ECM (66 percent), etc.
- Intriguingly, Forrester also tracked adoption of open source via proprietary applications: a full 72 percent of all surveyed organizations know that much of the proprietary software they license includes open-source components, while 39 percent regularly combine open source and proprietary software to solve business problems.”1
Acquia is hosting another report by Forrester – Web Content Management and Open Source, Answers to Frequently Asked Questions, written by Stephen Powers, with Kyle McNabb and Shelby Catino.
In this report, Forrester recommends that companies watch Drupal & Alfresco especially:
“Currently, enterprises interested in open source should keep an eye on two offerings — Alfresco Software and Drupal — because:
- Both have taken pages from the commercial vendors’ playbooks.
- Technologists praise the product architectures.
- Both have strong professional communities.”2
Forrester likes the project management team behind Alfresco, which has a corporate / commercial WCM management background, and the fact that Acquia has secured over $7 million USD in financing to develop an enterprise version of Drupal. Both platforms have strong user, developer, and support communities, as well as an abundance of open source code in the form of modules, themes, and other plugins.
When making a decision on an open source solution, Forrester recommend looking at the service provider first – who will be doing the implementation and maintenance, as well as focusing on scalability, security, and the extent of adoption of the platform on the web. An open question is whether or not open source will require more staff to implement the solution and whether this is offset on the savings vs. license fees on proprietary solutions.
Black Duck Software suggests the total savings of open source vs. proprietary software to be $387 billion USD!
“A new study suggests that companies can save $387 billion in development costs by using open-source software.
Talk about a stimulus.
Black Duck Software arrives at the $387 billion number by applying industry cost estimation standards to the available 4.9 billion lines of open-source code. Additionally, the company:
Estimates that 10 percent of IT application development spending is redundant with existing open-source projects, (which means that) U.S. companies could realize savings of more than $22 billion a year through the reuse of (open-source software) in application development.”3
In difficult economic times when businesses are doing everything they can to cut and manage costs, open source software has a big advantage, but look for this to continue even more when the economy recovers. In many instances it is not a cost issue driving the implementation of open source solutions – it is quality. Platforms like SugarCRM, Zimbra, Drupal, Alfresco, Liferay, Asterisk, OTRS, and trixbox Pro are all examples of open source programs that outperform their proprietary equivalents.
- http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10118123-16.html?tag=mncol;txt [↩]
- http://acquia.com/files/Forrester%20-%20WCM%20and%20Open%20Source.pdf [↩]
- http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10219775-16.html?subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&part=sphere [↩]
Download Design
Nice article. Totally agree!
Hard to stay alive in the prevailing market by taking measures on head count, reducing operation cost, freeze on salary hikes etc without reducing the cost of software licensing.