Current open source attitudes and adoption trends

Actuate publishes results of survey into open source attitudes.

Actuate, the leader in Business Intelligence, Performance Management and Reporting Applications and sponsors of the Eclipse Foundation Open Source Business Intelligence Project, BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools), has announced the early findings of its 2007 Open Source Software Survey, conducted simultaneously across the UK, North America and Germany.

Thousands of senior IT and Business professionals from diverse business sectors including Financial Services, Public Sector, Manufacturing and Telecommunications were targeted to gather input for this unique snapshot of Open Source software adoption trends.

The survey delivers valuable insights into how these global organisations perceive and plan to harness Open Source software in the future.

The survey, now in its second year, was first conducted in November 2005 and exclusively targeted Financial Services companies in the UK.

This year's extended survey embraces respondents from Germany and North America, both significant adopters of Open Source technology, and provides not only local but interesting regional comparisons across the geographies and across the vertical sectors within them.

UK financial services devotees will also benefit from a comparison in findings between this years results and those of 2005.

This year's global survey concentrates on key areas including Open Source software awareness and adoption levels, Open Source software benefits and barriers to its adoption; and thirdly Open Source software adoption influences and Open Source Business Intelligence.

Survey highlights include:.

* The financial services sector respondents represent large and medium financial services companies across the banking and insurance sectors.

Almost a quarter (22.9%) describes their organisation's level of familiarity with Open Source software as 'high', with a further 47.9% rating it as 'moderate' - Compared to the previous survey, respondents in financial services are now more familiar with Open Source software.

* Over half the respondents (52.1%) are using Linux.

Apache is the next most commonly used at 45.5%.

This is a reversal of positions from the 2005 survey.

* Compared to the previous survey, the proportion of financial services respondents using Open Source software has increased from 38.8% to 45.8% * Almost half of companies (47.9%) are already using Open Source software.

A further 3.4% are currently in the process of adopting it, with a further 1.8% having plans to adopt.

* By far the main perceived benefit of Open Source software is that there are no licence costs (64.3%).

Other significant perceived benefits are not being locked into Microsoft (45.2%), vendor independence (43.5%), access to source code (42.6%), flexibility (39.1%) and being built on Open platforms (37.4%).

* The main barriers to adopting Open Source technologies are the availability of long term support and the availability of long-term maintenance, each mentioned by half of respondents (49.1%).

These are closely followed by lack of in-house skills to implement (47.4%), with incompatibility with existing applications/data (42.2 %) and proven track record in real world apps (36.2%) emerging as other significant perceived barriers.

However, analysis by sector reveals that among Public Sector respondents the main barrier emerging is lack of in-house skill sets to implement.

* Almost half of respondents (45.3%) say that Open Source software is either the preferred option or is explicitly considered as an option when procuring software.

While a further 47.9% say that it is not mentioned, only 6.8% have a policy of not using Open Source software * Overall Germany records the highest percentage of respondents already using and/or familiar with Open Source Software.

This is believed to have many contributing factors which will be explored further in the full report.

* In North America almost half of the respondents (47.7%) are either using or planning to use Open Source Software with a further 10.5% currently evaluating.

* The proportion of North American respondents who feel that the benefits of Open Source software outweigh the inhibitors (51.9%) is five times as high as the proportion who do not believe this (10.5%).

Telecoms respondents show the most favourable attitude towards Open Source on this dimension.

Nobby Akiha, SVP of Marketing at Actuate spearheaded this worldwide research initiative and adds, "This year's survey has yielded a tremendous response with over 600 senior business professionals taking the time to give us a unique snapshot of their views and insights into Open Source Software adoption trends".

"The survey results help us to anticipate and respond to the demands of these key sectors and contribute directly to our product direction".

Speaking of the impact of Open Source technology, Ralph Muller, Representative of the Eclipse Foundation in Germany comments: "The results of the Open Source survey show that the technology is being used in many different industries and in critical business areas as well".

"The software has reached a maturity comparable to the development of commercial applications".

"This is an important signal towards the Eclipse Community which is working continuously for producing Open Source software in industrial strength".

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