I recently mentioned the Open Source Tour of Europe that Matt Aslett from The 451 Group did. For these of you who did not go and check the winner’s name on Matt’s blog, read on (even if you know the winner, read on, it’s still interesting).

The 4 semi-finalists were Germany, Portugal, Spain and France - France beating Germany in the final, albeit by a very short margin.

Even if Matt’s analysis only covered the 16 countries who had qualified for the Euro 2008 soccer tournament, a study by Forrester that looked at the whole world reached the same conclusions: French enterprises are the open source adoption champions - with German ones very close by.

Forrester’s study, Open Source Adoption: Notes from the field, highlights that Europeans are more advanced than Americans in term of using open source solutions, and that in Europe, three countries are ahead of the pack France, Germany and the UK. To reach these conclusions, Forrester polled and interviewed many customers at their IT Forum EMEA 2008.

France is the world champion with a 24% adoption rate, before Germany (21%), US and Canada (17%) and the UK (15%). Forrester adds that in one year, France’s numbers might reach 39%, Germany’s 34%, and so on.

Among adoption factors, price is the leader. One of the companies interviewed estimates their savings over three years to be €900,000 by replacing its proprietary application server with an open source solution.

Forrester goes on to analyze the adoption process in itself. They break it down into four steps:

1 - an open source operating system is introduced in the conventional servers
2 - open source is introduced in infrastructure components including application servers and development tools
3 - open source databases are adopted
4 - business applications are replaced by open source

There is a dark cloud in this study: even if enterprises seem to be more and more concerned with open source development technologies, few of them really contribute to their improvement. Efforts are still needed to involve them more in the development process, which includes providing feedback and needs information.

Do I need to mention, as a conclusion, that Talend is present today in the 3 countries that lead the open source adoption pack: France, Germany, US.

Bertrand

Taking as a pretext the Euro 2008 soccer (or football, as we say in Europe!) championship which saw Spain win the title, Matt Aslett from The 451 Group studied in detail open source adoption in the 16 countries that had qualified.
Matt looked at several criteria (projects, national policies and major suppliers) and looked at each group of the Euro 2008 to detail the strengths and weaknesses of each of these countries, as far as open source is concerned. He explains for example how Croatia has adopted in 2006 a charter aiming to grow the use of open source technologies in its government agencies, whereas Portugal has had such a principle since 2002. Romania seems to be lagging behind, despite strong public interest, and Germany and France have the most diverse projects and public initiatives.

The two countries that qualified for Matt’s open source final are both very active markets for Talend.
It is worth noting that some countries which did not qualify still deserve some attention - for example the UK, Belgium, Finland, Norway, Ireland, Denmark…

This study gives us a detailed vision of the adoption of open source in Europe. What comes out of this is that open source solutions are more widely spread than some people like to acknowledge, thanks in part to the help of governments and the involvement of IT staff, not only in government agencies but also in private companies.
Could open source become the driver of the renaissance of a great software industry in Europe - something that everyone is dreaming of, for example every year when the Truffle 100 Europe is published? It might very well be.

Bertrand