It was no surprise to me looking over results of the Future of Open Source Survey 2012 where Jay Lyman got it right: “open source code is making its way into today’s enterprise, webscale, consumer and other computing environments.” I actually addressed some of these very same points in my session at OSBC.
Technologies expected to see the most significant open source software community innovation were cloud highest at 40%, then mobile apps (19%) and mobile enterprise (15%) for a combined 34%, then analytics with 10%.
When asked for the top factors that make open source software attractive, respondents identified freedom from vendor lock-in (60%), lower acquisition and maintenance cost (51%), better quality (43%) and access to source code (42%). The 451 Group, industry analysts and one of the survey sponsors, reported that vendor lock-in has become a much greater factor for customers, which it believes has to do with cloud computing and customers’ desire to maintain flexibility as they figure out how to best leverage cloud resources.
We envision a world where this freedom drives innovation at all levels of technological behavior and advancement.
I believe that flexibility and freedom from lock-in will become an even bigger issue in the future. At Open-Xchange, we are busy building the next generation of communication and collaboration to do that, while keeping in mind our motto: “Ruthlessly Open – We Know How 2 Tear Down Walls.”
Our reasons are not philosophical, they are entirely practical. We’re technology advocates and users ourselves and know that productivity is highest when the barriers are lowest. We work hard for Open-Xchange to connect with everything and work together with everything – whether that is email software, control panel software or other data sources like LinkedIn and Facebook.
It’s also practical because it opens the largest market opportunity for our Open-Xchange software.
This direction is key to our growth, which has been around 50 percent overall and almost 100% for the SaaS platform business annually for several years running now. So, our belief in openness has been transformed to conviction at this point. If there are still any remaining non-believers in openness, its time to get going. Let the giants fight the patent wars. The Internet appears to have won the mobile war. It is our vision that the user experience comes out on top and wins the open source war.