Hyperconsolidation might not rule the day if governments and companies decide that it is too risky to become reliant upon a handful of vendors for their IT. By 2010, nervous governments in Europe and Asia could instead shift their purchasing and development dollars to open-source software. Overseas anxiety about vendor lock-in could be compounded by the fear that the single vendor will be American and might put European and Asian needs second. Many European and Asian companies might follow their governments’ lead by choice and by necessity?if their governments mandate open source for communication, they will need to comply.

Such a trend could force sweeping changes in the model for buying and supporting software. It could even spur a revolt among CIOs who decide that they have had enough of the endless cycles of complex licensing agreements and upgrades on enterprise software. Instead, they could adopt the open-source licensing model and turn everything they’ve paid for out to the market for free.

"What if corporations say, ’We don’t believe in licensing agreements anymore, and we’re going to open source all our [legacy] software and distribute it for free’?" asks Paul Maeder, managing general partner of venture capital company Highland Capital Partners.

By 2010, open-source alternatives for complex enterprise software are encroaching from all directions. Customer unhappiness, combined with the commodity threat of open source, will drive big vendors to completely revamp their sales, pricing and installation models. Some will make older versions of their software available for free and sell support to make money. New software will come with integration and upgrades included and be paid for on an as-needed basis. But some big software vendors won’t be able to make the switch, and they will be swallowed up by services vendors that offer clients paid support for open source as well as proprietary software. CIOs will once again be running development shops, but this time the work will be open source as often as it is proprietary.

Under this scenario, CIOs will be architecture experts who take a hands-on role in creating cheap, standards-based infrastructure from which they will build highly customized IT-enabled business processes based on open-source standards.

"We’ll see a model where you don’t pay for the software but the services," says Nick Gall, senior vice president and principal analyst for Meta Group. "Open source and commoditization is a bottom-up process. It will move slowly up over the next 20 years to the top of the stack. It will be a slow, painful process for vendors."