A recently published study on Open Source once again confirms what I have been saying over and over again: Open Source solutions get more and more entrenched in organizations.  And this isn’t going to stop any time soon…

Saugatuck Technology, an analyst firm specialized in new technologies, has published a report on Open Source: Open Source Software: The Next Disruptive IT Influence.  Among the numerous conclusions of this study, the analyst firm confirms that by 2010, Open Source applications will account for more than 50% of the IT systems for a third of organizations.  More importantly, more than half of the people who were polled said that Open Source solutions bring them a key competitive advantage.

Saugatuck explains these numbers by arguing that after 10 years during which Open Source solutions were only used by early adopters, they now enter a maturity phase, and get generally adopted by enterprises.  These enterprises include now Open Source in their IT strategy: 25% of them always consider Open Source when choosing a new system, and 40% do so frequently.  From 10% today, the “market share” of Open Source will climb to 20% over the course of the next three years.

Furthermore, as highlighted by Saugatuck, users will be able to rely more and more on Open Source components, without knowing it, by using on-demand solutions (SaaS) which often leverage the openness, performance and reliability of our solutions.

Bertrand