Surveys Spotlight Lingering Fear of Open Source - Systems Management News On The Web

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AS OF 9/8/2008 2:46AM EST

Surveys Spotlight Lingering Fear of Open Source
By Alex Handy

July 23, 2008 — What enterprises don't know about open-source software can hurt them. This week, two open-source companies released surveys of their customers, and some of the results highlight a lingering fear of open source. These surveys have been compiled since the beginning of the year. EnterpriseDB's survey had 500 respondents, while OpenLogic's focused on 123 enterprise users.

Kim Weins, vice president of product and marketing at OpenLogic, said that support is becoming a more important asset for open-source users. “As enterprises increase their open-source adoption, they have to address how they support that software,” said Weins. “The sample size of our survey is small but reflects exactly what we’ve been seeing in the marketplace for years ... Vendors looking to sell OSS support need to provide value to enterprises that goes above and beyond what they get today from the community and internal resources.”

Chief among open-source solutions provider OpenLogic's findings in a survey released yesterday, which focused on service and support for open-source software, was the discovery that around 30 percent of the respondents believed that finding service and support vendors for open source was too hard. Once found, however, that around 43 percent said that open-source service and support tends to be of the same quality as the support options offered by larger, proprietary software vendors.

Even without a vendor to support the software, however, 42 percent of respondents were very satisfied with the help they could find online in message boards and mailing lists. Forty-five percent also said their internal support services were the first step for solving a problem, hinting that internal experts are the most popular and effective way to deal with open source.

A second survey, by open-source database provider EnterpriseDB, focused on the use of open-source databases and found that 52 percent of those surveyed were avoiding open-source databases due to a lack of in-house knowledge.

Most open-source databases in enterprises—78 percent according to the survey—were no larger than 50GB in size. Two percent had hit the terabyte mark.

As EnterpriseDB offers its own flavor of the PostgreSQL database, much of the survey focused on that project. PostgreSQL users, according to the survey, tended to pick the database for its high transactional capabilities and high reliability, with 38 percent citing this as the primary reason for choosing it.

Despite its growing popularity, PostgreSQL isn't replacing commercial databases in the majority of enterprises. The EnterpriseDB survey found that only 11 percent of respondents had adopted an open-source database to replace Microsoft SQL Server, while 6 percent had moved from Oracle. Only 2 percent had moved off of IBM's DB2.

Related Search Term(s): databases, open source, EnterpriseDB, OpenLogic

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