In a survey of 300 Fortune 1000 CIOs, Accenture Research Labs found that more than two-thirds of organizations (69 percent) anticipate increased investment in open-source software in 2010. More than a third of them (38 percent), meanwhile, expect to migrate mission-critical software to open source in the next 12 months.
Accenture’s Joseph Tobolksi, meanwhile, echoed similar sentiments at this week’s most recent GigaOM Bunker session, saying that 23 percent of survey respondents see open source as the default option for new projects in the enterprise.
Yet while enterprises indicate more interest in using open source software to complete assignments, there is a problem in scaling the experience and skills required to deliver projects, along with other barriers to innovation. So, is there a route to the completely open source enterprise or is that model in danger of losing momentum under the twin pressures of enterprise sales cycles and new development challenges elsewhere?
From Free to Tactical Software
The recent history of open source provides some clues:
When “’free software”’ became “’open source software” in the late 1990s, the “’traditional”’ open source project was still a challenge to large commercial vendors, usually those selling an infrastructure product. The disruptive nature of these open source projects (which provided essential products for free) and attraction to developers of Linux, Mozilla and MySQL undermined dominant closed solutions.
The desire to provide free and openly shared infrastructure still exists, though nowadays 50 percent percent of open source developers are paid. And these days, open source projects can also be far more tactical, i.e., aimed at a specific objective. An example of this would be CITRIX fully open sourcing its XenServer, which was seen by some as a way for Microsoft to go head-to-head with VMware .
Open Source Today: The Benefits
There are a few key reasons why CIOs choose open source in the enterprise: low cost of ownership, control, maintainability, better quality code, community responsiveness and security. The benefits of these factors seem less disputed than ever, though, as Mark Tolliver, CEO of Palamida, pointed out at the Bunker session, there are still enterprises that veto open source, a policy he describes as “nuts.” Many of the largest commercial players — Apple, Google — now behave like good open source citizens by not just using but also contributing code back to the community, another sign that the philosophy of open source is more widely endorsed.
Open source has also, more recently, migrated to the application layer and become embedded in new, large-scale web platforms like Facebook. In cases like this, the innovation is in architecting huge distributed platforms capable of supporting an unprecedented number of users. Open source also drives cloud computing and SaaS.
Barriers to the Completely Open Source Enterprise
But as open source becomes more of a default option for enterprises, challenges continue to arise.
One, raised by Javier Soltero of SpringSource, is that developers need to be paid. Coding projects is hard work and the mechanisms to reward people for their efforts are still not enough. Around 75 percent of code contributed to the Linux Kernel, for instance, is now written by paid developers, but this is probably high compared to other projects, and even so, 25 percent of contributions go unpaid.
A second barrier, which emerged in a discussion of SaaS at the Bunker event, is that the people drawn to open source are by their nature innovators. Right now SaaS is a real focal point of innovation, particularly in the apps layer, attracting developers with its combination of technical challenges and market opportunities.
John Robb of Zimbra pointed out that where people really care enough to address critical apps problems they are doing it in SaaS. SaaS offers are often built on open source components though, so in a sense SaaS takes the headlines while open source is still doing a lot of the work.
Increasingly though the enterprise decision on software is based around what simply works best for a growing organization. In some cases this can even mean using proprietary software, if it has obvious benefits. The large web platforms, meanwhile, are not wedded to open source. As David Recordon Senior Open Programs Manager at Facebooks made clear, even Facebook has moved on from open source as a default option.
There are also areas like enterprise resource planning (ERP), which look ripe for an open source disruption but where talent has not been inclined to innovate. A finding from Accenture’s research notes that 35 percent of companies see developer training as the most significant barrier to adoption.
As Tobolksi points out, “Domain expertise and coding capability is rare. Finding people with ERP experience and the skill to do something about it is rare.”
And there is a special challenge in today’s economic climate. The CIO today faces difficult economic conditions, more spending scrutiny and less resources, and might, as Tobolksi, says be drawn to open source. In fact many would happily ditch proprietary software. But CIO attention is 70 percent operational. The economic circumstances of the day allied to the conservative nature of decision making lessens the chance for a wider adoption of open source, even though the benefits are clear.
“It comes down to risk mitigation,” says Tobolski. “If the apps are running and you’re not getting calls from the business manager saying why won’t this work…” So why risk innovation?
Open Source Not the Only Innovation Driver
Open source is certainly no less dynamic than previously and is certainly winning over a growing number of enterprise clients. But enterprises often decide against it because of incomplete market offers from the open-source stack.
User-organizations, meanwhile, are finding new ways to create applications where both open source and SaaS are not the innovation drivers. Open Health Tools (OHT), for example, is a consortium of companies and health providers developing new tools for patient records. Here, end-user organizations play a more important partnership role, defining their needs into the specification phase. Open source is part of that but the service delivery end of the stack is leading it. The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN), which is looking to create flexibility in banking through service-orientated architecture (SOA), is another example.
In some areas, like banking and insurance, legal responsibilities drive enterprises to buy from vendors who can indemnify them against the risk of system failure. Open source has fallen away in those heavily regulated environments. James Turnbull of Puppet Labs pitched in with his experience of banks: “Indemnification is a very big issue. Open source fell away because no one can recover the risk.”
Some of the old arguments against open source clearly won’t go away. But the message of the day is clear: the innovation framework is broadening.
As the Accenture research shows, we very well could be at a turning point, with a deeper adoption of open source lying directly ahead. But the movement needs to address the issues outlined above. Businesses, meanwhile, need to attract the talent to take on challenges enterprises are currently wrestling with: the need to become agile at lower cost while protecting against risk and to scale solution delivery. So, even though open source has benefits in risk reduction, that argument is not yet won.
