451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
Open source means cost savings
Jay Lyman, December 14, 2009 @ 2:16 am ETWe’ve just published our latest CAOS special report, ‘Climate Change -User perspectives on the impact of economic conditions on open source software adoption.’ The report is based on our recent survey findings among more than 1,700 open source software customers and users, and also offers guidance on calculating cost savings from open source software.
Those open source software customers and end users, which range from large enterprises to SMBs in a variety of industries and geographies, provided further reinforcement to the idea that difficult economic conditions can be good for open source software and its vendors. While we began examining this trend as it began at the end of last year, our November 2009 survey provided confirmation from customers that economic conditions are indeed driving many of their decisions in favor of open source software. When asked whether the current economic climate had impacted their companies’ attitude toward open source, 46.5% said they were more inclined to open source. Another 47.7% reported no change in attitude from the economy, but only 2.5% were less likely to adopt open source given current conditions. Another 3.4% were less likely to adopt any software because of the current economic climate (proprietary or open source).
What also stands out from the survey is the fact that open source software seems to be living up to its reputation as a cost-savings mechanism, meeting or exceeding cost savings expectations almost 90% of the time. Fewer than 5% of our respondents reported that open source software did not meet their cost-savings expectations.
While cost remains the key benefit for organizations deciding on open source software, flexibility emerges as the primary benefit after open source software has been adopted, according to our survey. Cost remains a key benefit, of course, but we also see other factors, such as reliability, performance and speed cited by survey respondents. Vendor lock-in, or avoiding it, is also a perceived benefit of open source software, but this is apparently becoming less important to customers, particularly after adoption.
The report delves more deeply into these and other trends, including both how customers and end users view the benefits of open source software, and how to effectively calculate potential cost savings from open source.
The full Climate Change report, including detailed analysis of the survey results and advice on cost analysis for open source software, is available now. Meanwhile a free version containing only the survey results is also available for download (registration required).
Comments (38) Categories: Software
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[...] be providing some data points from our recent surveys on database adoption and open source adoption while EnterpriseDB’s Larry Alston will also showcase successful enterprise deployments of [...]
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[...] cost remains attractive, flexibility emerges as the primary benefit after open source has been adopted. 3 Having control of source code [...]
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[...] be providing some data points from our recent surveys on database adoption and open source adoption while EnterpriseDB’s Larry Alston will also showcase successful enterprise deployments of [...]
[...] cost remains attractive, flexibility emerges as the primary benefit after open source has been adopted. 3 Having control of source code [...]
[...] awakening and why now? I believe it is a combination of two things: open source software’s association with cost savings and its significance and prominence in cloud computing. There are other factors [...]
[...] cost remains attractive, flexibility emerges as the primary benefit after open source has been adopted. 3 Having control of source code [...]
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[...] first saw the prominence of license management in today’s enterprise IT when we asked in December 2009 more than 1,700 open source users and customers to rank the sources of cost [...]
[...] highlighted by the impact of economic conditions, which according to both previous FOOS surveys and our own survey have been a key driver of broader enterprise use of open [...]
[...] cost remains attractive, flexibility emerges as the primary benefit after open source has been adopted. 3 Having control of source code [...]
[...] (TCO) and only 13% indicating a higher TCO in the cloud. Similar to what we have seen with the drivers of open source software, there was also an indication in the Future of Cloud Survey that other factors are [...]
[...] to adopting and using open source software — is also another indicator of the drivers, advantages and challenges of open source software, which have typically been about cost, flexibility and [...]
[...] driving open source? Well, when we asked customers nearly two years ago, the clear, primary driver was cost. Customers and users also rated flexibility as both a top driver of open source adoption and a [...]
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[...] top? Jay Lyman, August 11, 2011 @ 2:19 pm ET We’ve written about how a bad economy is indeed good for open source software. We’ve also recognized that with open source software’s maturity and place at [...]
[...] (TCO) and only 13% indicating a higher TCO in the cloud. Similar to what we have seen with thedrivers of open source software, there was also an indication in the Future of Cloud Survey that other factors are [...]