Stephen Powers of Forrester Research recently released a report identifying Alfresco and Drupal as the two open source content management platforms to which enterprises should pay the most attention. Specifically, the report claims that “enterprises interested in open source should keep an eye on two offerings — Alfresco Software and Drupal.” (Also check out Matt Asay’s coverage of the report for CNet).

I couldn’t agree more - though I wish the report had come out a few weeks ago. It would have made for a good introduction to the panel on Open Source Platforms which I moderated at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. The panelists were:

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According to some recent research from IDC direct revenues generated by Open Source companies are going to increase by almost 25% annually, from 1.7 million in 2007 to 4.8 million in 2012. This includes only revenues generated by Open Source software that is directly distributed by the companies behind the projects. Geht es nach dem Marktforschungsinstitut IDC, wird der erzielte Umsatz mit Open-Source-Software (OSS) bis ins Jahr 2012 jährlich um fast 25 Prozent auf 4,8 Milliarden US-Dollar anwachsen. Im vergangenen Jahr wurden mit OSS rund 1,7 Milliarden US-Dollar umgesetzt. In reality though this is only a small share of the revenues enabled through Open Source software.

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I just stumbled over an article in CIO.COM written by Esther Schindler. Based on the statistics published, 53% of the participants are using Open Source applications in their organization today, an additional 10 percent are planning to do so in the next year. Nearly half (44%) stated that Open Source solution are considered equally with proprietary solutions during the acquisition process. Of course operating systems and web server are always popular but more interesting is that 45% are using desktop applications such as OpenOffice.org and 29% use Open Source Enterprise applications. In general Open Source technologies are gaining confidence. Reasons for picking Open Source are primarly of financial nature (56%), but flexibility is catching up with 32%, access to the source code is ramping up to 30%. Looking at the barriers product support concerns are raised by 45%, awareness/knowledge of available solutions comes up second with 29%. And this is where our Enterprise Open Source Directory comes into play. Good! Other barriers mentioned with lower priority are security concerns, lack of management support and licensing/legal questions, that clearly seen less of an issue compared with some years ago.

So, we didn’t really need another survey to be convinced, but it’s a good sign that enterprises using Open Source are on the right track.

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