Unisys GM of Open Source Shares 2008 Predictions

Unisys VP and GM of Open Source Business, Anthony Gold recently made some predictions for 2008. The prediction that caught my eye was this one:

4. Businesses will increase the speed with which they leverage open source in enterprise applications as well as in operational and business management functions.

Gold says that in 2008, adoption of open source alternatives for a variety of enterprise applications and management requirements will continue to increase in areas that have long been the nearly exclusive province of proprietary solutions.

Increasingly popular tools for business and IT monitoring – such as JasperSoft and Pentaho for dashboard reporting in business intelligence (BI) applications and GroundWork, Hyperic and Zenoss for operations control – will penetrate even further into corporate IT infrastructures. So will business solutions such as Alfresco for enterprise content management (ECM), Concursive Concourse for customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, Compiere and Openbravo for enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, and a host of new collaboration technologies based on web 2.0 capabilities.

Gold points out that market dynamics and government requirements are major factors in this evolution. Many rapidly developing areas, such as China and other parts of the Asia Pacific region, have first-generation IT infrastructures in which proprietary applications have not been widely deployed. Consequently, they are very receptive to open source solutions as a first choice. In Europe, state and local governments and even the European Union are driving use of open solutions for ECM in order to facilitate the sharing of increasingly large amounts of information among governments with a common need for access.

I think Anthony’s right. More applications are going to displace or take the place of proprietary enterprise applications. Obviously we think there’s a huge opportunity for Zenoss especially when faced with the alternative of proprietary enterprise applications. I also agree that as developing countries like China grow their IT infrastructure they can grow it without locking into proprietary software from the start.