Analyst Firm Gets It Half-Right
IDC, a well-known analyst firm (and, in the interest of full disclosure, a sister firm of CIO's publisher, CXO Media), has just released a study on the topic of open source, concluding that open source represents "the most significant all-encompassing and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s."
IDC surveyed 5000 developers in 116 countries and discovered that open source is used by 71% of them and -- perhaps more surprisingly -- is used in 54% of their production environments.
Upon its release, a senior executve at IDC said "Although open source will significantly reduce the industry opportunity over the next ten years, the real impact of open source is to sustain innovations in mature software markets, thus extending the useful life of software assets and saving customers money."
Yes -- and no. Or perhaps more accurately, Yes, and more yes.
The conclusions reached by the firm are very interesting. As it identifies a near-three-quarters proportion of software developers using open source, it recognizes the enormous impact that open source is having on IT organizations.
These organizations are leveraging open source to get their work done faster, cheaper, and with more control. This clearly represents a revolution in how IT operates.
On the other hand, IDC fails to really examine the implications of their findings. Their report analyzes the use of open source through the lens of the software industry -- but that's a myopic view.
This short-sightedness is a natural outcome of the vendor-centric approach to IT that most of the industry suffers from. So, from this perspective, open source is mostly about how it's going to affect the packaged software industry -- and its real impact is to shore up existing software markets. In other words, what's important about open source is what it does to the software industry and, by the way, it will save customers some money as well.
While this acknowledges the effect open source will have on existing software players (which will be profound), it fails to recognize the revolution it will bring about in how we run organizations.
In a world of expensive, inflexible software, only the most conservative, obvious-payoff projects get funded. In the new world of open source, companies can experiment, develop prototypes on the cheap, and inexpensively scale the winners. To understand this dynamic, look at the Web 2.0 companies. I don't necessarily believe that most of them have a sustainable business at their core -- but that's not important. What they represent is a totally different way of getting Internet businesses off the ground. What Flickr, YouTube, and a hundred other companies have in common is that they leverage cheap hosting, open source software, and commodity hardware to get going -- without a cent of venture capital. Put in language that we all use: they delivered applications without having to make capex investment or even use much operational budget.
Seeing open source as the lower-cost alternative to traditional software categories is to miss the enormous effect it's going to have on the industry. What open source does is to completely change the economics of IT projects. Viewing the importance of a new product type as how it will affect incumbents and established working practices is the long-honored mistake of established players, as convincingly described by Clayton Christensen in his books like The Innovator's Dilemma. Time and again established vendors -- and their customers -- have evaluated new technologies by comparing them to existing technologies, typically concluding that they are inadequate, thereby missing the opportunity to take advantage of a new, cheaper way of doing things.
Don't perceive open source as a cut-price version of what you've already got. Think about what projects you can incubate and perhaps hatch into fledgling new lines of business by leveraging easily available, easily modifiable, low-cost software. Look where you've never looked before -- instead of taking another look at the same old flock of applications.
What is Tech Briefcase?
TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more
Bookmark content
Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.
Search and Store
Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.
View Anywhere
Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
