Open Source and the Enterprise
May 31st, 2008The Strategy & Architecture team at work produce a quarterly journal Perspectives on Technology. It’s an in-house publication, with a distribution list of three hundred or so senior managers and influencers in the organisation. I’ve just got a ‘hot off the press’ copy of the Summer 2008 edition which includes an article on open source by yours truly. As the Group’s Chief Architect says in his introduction: “The article exploring the benefits and challenges of Open Source software may create some debate” - well, that was the intention 
I’m waiting for comments to come in, but in the meantime I was interested to read a report of a survey undertaken by CIO.com:
The statistics from a CIO.com survey make it clear: Open-source solutions are becoming more commonplace in corporate IT, if not precisely mundane. The study also identifies where the friction is in business open-source adoption, and which application types are most popular.
Most interesting was a 45% usage figure for OpenOffice.org - a higher market share than expected.
While following up links, I also came across this article in ZDNet about Specsavers:
Specsavers is approaching open-source software as a strategic investment that will give it control over the future direction of the company’s infrastructure. Open source means that Specsavers can choose when to upgrade and can take its choice of software packages, because they’re all interoperable … more UK companies are beginning to show a serious interest in open source. The only thing holding them back is “inertia”, Taylor said. Other UK companies with a board-level interest in open source include Malmaison and Unilever.
The UK isn’t exactly a hot bed of open source adoption, so I was pleased to find these references to point people to when they start asking questions as a result of the article in Perspectives.