Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit

Open Source Software (OSS) in Workplace. What It Promises and What It Delivers.

Nikos Drakos gave this presentation as pre-conference tutorial. It is pity that attendance was low because of the traveling problems (north east coast got hit by a snowstorm) and the presentation itself was positioned as add-on not a first class conference material. Just a thought: is it indication that Gartner still perceives the topic as not ready for a prime time?

Here are some interesting points in the presentation.

• OSS is not free software. The price structure is different. You don’t have to pay upfront license fees. But accepting the OSS the company usually takes on more responsibility of managing the product. It may lead to bigger total cost of ownership (TCO).
• Size of the investment into OSS in the workplace is very impressive. In many cases Web 2.0 drives adoption of OSS in the workplace.
• Even if your strategic direction doesn’t except OSS you still have to pay attention especially in the workspace area.
• To the large extend the success or failure of OSS product adoption in the enterprise depends on its alignment with existing and “strategic” products and technologies that are available as a coherent platform or solution. This is an important differentiator for mainstream products of successful platform vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle or SAP. In the best-of-bread strategy that is at least partially based on OSS products cross-certification and integration become a major issue.
• OSS is not a trademark. That leads to diversions and misuse of OSS as marketing tool.
• OSS in the workplace has significantly more diverse ecosystem. We don’t have a clear winner.
• Rules of thumb on when OSS product may fit well into organization. Repeatability or ability to reuse OSS product or replicate OSS based solution in different areas of organization. Proximity (you have need for significant inhouse custom development, you have the expertise, it is just a matter of using this or that product).

And finally key predictions and strategic planning assumptions.
• By 2010, OSS solutions will directly compete with closed-source products in all software infrastructure and workplace application markets.
• By 2010, at least 40% of mainstream IT organizations will include OSS in their workplace-focused software investments.
• By 2010, OSS will be included in mission critical software portfolios in 75% of Global 2000 enterprises.