IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau) — As more than 11,000 attendees prepare to converge on San Francisco for the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo next week, one industry analyst says customers are evaluating open-source software the same way they evaluate proprietary software: It has to be priced right and work well.
Enterprises are judging open source on its up-front cost, total cost of ownership, reliability and features, just as they would a commercial product, said Matt Lawton, an analyst with IDC. Criteria unique to open source such as issues of potential liability for patent infringement and the level of technical support, are way down the list of worries.
"Software is software and things like functionality and reliability are the most important attributes, regardless of whether the software is open source or not," Lawton said. "But having said that, to the extent that open source can save end users money, then they are all ears."
If open source is increasingly being considered on par with proprietary software, that opens more opportunities for it in the enterprise market for use in servers, desktop computers and mobile devices.
Worldwide revenue for open-source software, which reached US$1.8 billion in 2006, is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 26 percent, reaching $5.8 billion by 2011, IDC research shows.
Attendance at LinuxWorld, scheduled for Monday through Thursday, is expected to be higher than last year's 10,000 because LinuxWorld is running concurrently with the first-ever Next-Generation Data Center (NGDC) conference, which devoted to energy efficiency and the use of virtualization. (Both conferences are produced by IDG World Expo, which, like IDG News Service, is owned by International Data Group.)
Virtualization is also becoming more widely accepted and deployed in enterprises. Virtualization is software that divides one server into multiple logical servers, enabling IT professionals to run multiple software applications efficiently on one machine, increasing utilization rates. A few years ago, companies used virtualization primarily in software test and development environments, but as they become more confident, companies are using it in production environments, said Andreas Antonopoulos of Nemertes Research. Virtualization can be an energy saver because if server utilization increases to 70 percent or 80 percent from the average 1 percent to 20 percent, fewer power-hungry servers will be needed.
Antonopoulos calls virtualization the "sardine can" strategy. The idea is to cram as many applications into one server as possible, like squeezing the tiny fish into a can. "That strategy has allowed IT departments to use more software applications ... for the same amount of capital budget," he said.
