Streadily Increasing Penetration of Open Source Software in Europe Reported

Recent Forrester research into open source software, sponsored by and released by Bull on December 1, documents the conventional wisdom of slow, steady increasing acceptance of open source by "large enterprises" in Europe.

The survey says, in my opinion (using a little of my own unscientific triangulation), that about 14% of large European enterprises are using open source program development software, databases and web servers; 12% are using open source operating systems such as Sun (JAVA) Solaris and Red Hat (RHT) Enterprise Linux; a smaller percentage is using open source middleware such as application servers, enterprise service buses and portals; down to about 5% using open source application frameworks such as Rails and Spring and IDEs such as Eclipse.

The triangulation is necessary because Forrester was commissioned to interview “enterprises already using open source, at least at a minimal level,” which Forrester says is 15%-24% of enterprises in Europe and North America today. But Forrester does not provide the detail behind that 15%-24% estimate so I am just using 20% as a multiplier against the reported data points  Forrester uses similar triangulation within the report at the country level (the report is available from the Bull link provided above if you fill in a form).

Most of the enterprises in the survey that said they were not yet using such open source software said they would be adding it to their mix in the next 12-24 months. Only very small percentages in each product category said they had no plans to adopt such software, and that backs up the primary Forrester conclusion—with which IT Investment Research analysis agrees—that says the penetration of open source software is inevitable.  Forrester found similar adoption and planned-acquisition percentages for collaboration, business-intelligence, ERP and CRM software. That is why Bull (BULL-Euronext), IBM (IBM), Oracle (ORCL), Sun and now even Microsoft (MSFT) are committed to re-building their businesses incorporating open source terms and conditions.

CAUTION: The survey sample was heavily weighted to government users. This skews the results because European politicians are pushing open source in an inexplicable attempt to roll-back a perceived domination of U.S.-domiciled software companies in Europe. The political position is inexplicable because, on one hand, these U.S.-domiciled companies have tens of thousands of European employees and, on the other, most of the leading open source projects mentioned in the survey are at least nominally North American based. But no one ever expects politicians to be logical. (Alfresco, Mule, OpenBravo and Talend are exceptions and—because software really has no nationality—most of the others have multinational contributors). 

(NOTE: Some of the Forrester analysis covers North America and Europe but the data points are only European. Further, some person-to-person interviewing was done but the data points are only those resulting from an online survey with 102 respondents.)