Open source should be on the short list when it comes to application-buying decisions in 2007, industry experts say.
“Open source has won the first battle: It is now listed among the default platform decisions,” says Dave Jenkins, CTO at online outdoor sporting goods retailer Backcountry.com in Park City, Utah. The next step, open source users agree, is moving up the stack and figuring out which open source tools are ready for enterprise deployments.
“Infrastructure open source products are essentially a no-brainer at this point, but the adoption of enterprise applications has been slow,” says Curtis Edge, CIO at The Christian Science Monitor, which revamped its Web sites with open source software last year.
Edge traces the lag in adoption to the fact that IT decision makers often don’t factor open source into their software-buying discussions, because they’re uncertain about newer open source tools.
For his part, Edge continues to expand the open source products on his radar. “There are a lot of new commercial open source products, and many more to come [this] year,” he says. “SugarCRM, Alfresco, EnterpriseDB lead my list of commercial open source products that are — or will be — ready for prime time in the next six to 12 months. I am sure there are many more.”
Organizations should expect a widening list of open source options in 2007 as venture capitalists continue to put money into companies formed to provide support for open source tools. Digium, the commercial entity that supports the Asterisk open source IP PBX, got a $13.8 million boost from venture capitalists last year, for example.
“The next area for a lot of activity seems to be around IT management and monitoring, virtualization management, systems management,” says Raven Zachary, analyst at The 451 Group. “There are a lot of start-ups right now that have gotten funding.”
Jim Klein, director of information services and technology for the Saugus Union School District in California, says he expects a significant rise in the number of commercial open source offerings this year and in the number of enterprises that latch on to those products.
“The case can be made that Linux on the desktop may actually come of age this year. . . . [And I] expect some significant corporate moves to solutions such as Zimbra [open source collaboration and messaging software] from Exchange,” Klein says.
Where things stand
Open source is going mainstream, but not all open source tools are equal. Here’s a look at how enterprise-ready some free software products are:
• Most mature: development tools (Eclipse, Hibernate, Struts), server operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD)
• Maturing: application servers (JBoss, Geronimo), security software (Snort, Nessus)
• Growing: collaboration (Zope, Drupal), content management (Alfresco, OpenCms), directory services (OpenLDAP)
• Emerging: databases (MySQL, Ingres), enterprise applications (SugarCRM, Compiere), portals (Jetspeed, Zope), search engines (Apache Lucene, ht://Dig), virtualization software (Xen)
• Embryonic: integration services (openadaptor), enterprise service buses (Open ESB, Mule), process management applications (OpenFlow)
With more options, corporate users should take heart from the fact that making the case for open source should get easier in 2007, analysts say. More deployments should be mature enough to point to as real-world examples, and customers should find increasing support from both open source companies and proprietary vendors.
In addition, users should look for new delivery models from such vendors as SpikeSource and OpenLogic, which provide preintegrated software stacks with open source components and open source software delivered as a service.
“It’s still the case that people who suggest open source are the lone voices in many organizations,” says Nikos Drakos, research director at Gartner. “But in 2007 you’ll find that as open source proves itself, it will be considered battle-tested and be an easier sell.”
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