Open Source continues to be relevant for organizations. In the last year we have seen several clients continue to work with Open Source at a large scale, and we have seen an increase in proposal work related to Open Source. The Open Source Conference 2010 indicated a tipping point in the market, and was one of the largest Enterprise IT events in the Dutch market that was attended by almost 450 people.

Looking forward now, market analysts expect this trend to continue. Enterprises will increasingly deploy Open Source solutions in mission critical scenarios, at a service level that must be equal to or even better than closed source alternatives. Additionally, these solutions are being adopted increasingly by conservative IT organizations, driven by risk mitigations and cost considerations. Typically, organizations adopt the Open Source software stack bottom-up, that is they start on the system infrastructure level (eg. LINUX) and then move up the stack to application infrastructure (think applications servers) and to business applications.

Gartner published the report “Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software, 2011” on august 9th, 2011) which perfectly illustrates the expected adoption patterns of Open Source technologies by enterprises. Looking forward to the next 2 years, Gartner expects high benefits from initiatives that enable mission critical workloads on LINUX and LINUX on IBM Z-series. Additionally, benefits are expected in the next 2 years from initiatives that help organizations adopt Open Source DBMS, E-learning systems, messaging systems and Portals.

It is interesting to note that these areas are very strongly aligned with the Accenture Open Source Offerings. The Accenture Open Source substitution offering migrates proprietary solutions to Open Source solutions on the Operating System level (AIX/Solaris to LINUX), on the database level (eg. Oracle to MySQL/EnterpriseDB) and application server level (eg Websphere/Weblogic to JBOSS). For all solutions mission critical architectures are available to meet todays requirements in a very cost-effective manner. It helps clients to realize business applications using Open Source. A few good examples in this area are Portal solutions, Document and content management solutions, E-learning solutions and E-commerce platforms.

The adoption of Open Source in the Dutch market has clearly started, and we believe over time the usage of Open Source will become a “no brainer” for a number of areas. While many organizations might not do a stand-alone “Open Source” project, many large scale infrastructure transformation programs heavily use Open Source. The usage of Open Source technologies can also be a good step towards Cloud Computing in a number of cases over a longer term.