A worldwide Gartner survey conducted this summer with 274 companies from various disciplines claims that 85% of companies now use open source components in their information systems, and that the 15% who have not yet adopted such technologies will within a year.

Although this is very positive and reflects a massive increase in the adoption of open source in recent years, it would be surprising if Gartner wasn’t hedging its bets.  Have they suddenly become believers in open source?  The Gartner study states that the projects using open source are relating mainly to infrastructure – open source components appear more mature in this area – even if uses in the applications domain is gradually progressing and will continue to do so in the coming year.

The adoption factor still primarily concerns the economic aspects of a project (reducing the total cost of ownership through lower licensing costs) and ease of implementation (user friendliness), regardless of whether the project is critical or not (which is new). For a growing number of enterprises it’s also important that they preserve their independence vis-à-vis single-source suppliers, who shackle them with proprietary technologies.

There’s nothing very new under the sun: open source technologies continue to take root in corporate information systems and there is still some room for improvement. Obviously, we’re delighted.

But, driven by their clear desire to denigrate open source anyway, Gartner recommends that companies using open source on a daily basis start to structure a genuine open source strategy in order to get the most out of it – today, 69% of them don’t measure either the risk or the actual cost of the open source solutions they use. “Companies must have a policy for procuring OSS, deciding which applications will be supported by OSS, and identifying the intellectual property risk supportability, or risk associated with using OSS,” said Laurie Wurster, Research Director at Gartner.  “Once a policy is in place, then there must be a governance process to enforce it.”  As if open source was the only area in which businesses should have a deployment and governance strategy!  And why always compare proprietary solutions to open source when the two are complementary?

Another development is also noteworthy: companies are no longer simply adopting open source infrastructure to replace proprietary solutions (because of obsolescence or poor performance; now they are interested in the technology for new projects.  This not only indicates that companies have improved open source skills, but may also suggest that they’re following the same trend in terms of applications. And I believe that this will happen soon.

Governance, standardization of open source technologies in infrastructure, and increased acceptance of such applications are all topics requiring that companies make a real investment in open source technologies – universities are particularly absent in this area, but that’s another debate.

The issue of competencies was one of the focuses of the Open World Forum which just took place in Paris. Although according to the speakers, the demand for training grows about 30% per year, some arenas seem to be growing faster than others: the user-friendliness of the desktop (e.g, Open Office) has substantially reduced training requirements; training related to infrastructure products remains stable and courses dedicated to applications are exploding, particularly in the field of Business Intelligence.

At Talend, this doesn’t surprise us! The Talend Roadshow that crisscrossed Europe (ten stops to date in France, Switzerland, Benelux, and Germany – with others planned for 2009 in other cities) has trained over 300 people. The response of our certified partners has been similar. And participation in our roadshow is an excellent means of evaluating how deeply rooted we are in companies – a barometer much more effective than studies by analysts who focus on market share!

Bertrand