Bringing Open Source into Your IT Strategy?

This IDC study is intended to provide to both CIOs and the vendor community an overview of the direction in open source adoption in the enterprise today. IT vendors grapple with monetizing open source software (OSS). New communities of developers continue to form in support of a broad range of requirements, while enterprises increasingly invite OSS into their IT mix. The complex OSS ecosystem of vendors/distributors, coders, and end-user organizations expands as demand for and acceptance of functionality at one point in the software stack drive demand for adjacent OSS functionality. This study also endeavors to touch on the following questions:

What are the IT and business drivers for open source adoption? Why are some organizations not deploying or limiting their adoption of open source? To what extent is Linux playing into acceptance of other open source initiatives? How are open source initiatives such as MySQL and JBoss being received by the enterprise? What are key questions that CIOs should be asking around the deployment of open source?

"CIOs and IT managers are focused first and foremost on keeping costs down while maintaining as low a level of risk as possible. These factors are then balanced against a need to address both immediate and longer-term business needs," explains David Senf, program manager, IT/Business Enablement. He adds, "As perceptions of software price-value imbalance, vendor lock-in, and security risks build around proprietary software, end-user organizations are pressed to seek alternatives. The reality, though, is that both Linux and OSS can cost more, can create a situation of lock-in, and may not be more secure."