Open source adoption growing in Europe, IDC finds

Written by Jessie Richards

New research has suggested that businesses are increasingly implementing open source enterprise applications in their IT projects.

A survey of 515 western European IT decision makers carried out by industry analyst IDC found that nine per cent now used an open source back-office application, while seven per cent have an open source customer relationship management solution.

Bo Lykkegaard, research director of European enterprise applications and services at the organisation, commented: "Usage can mean anything from departmental use or niche use to enterprise-wide deployment. We expect the majority of users of open source enterprise applications to use commercial enterprise applications at the same time."

The research also discovered that the main driver of open source deployment is the absence of an upfront license fee, while the lower total cost of ownership is another attractive feature.

However, it also found that the leading barriers to the use of open source applications are the quality of the applications and the level of software support, which may highlight the need for IT outsourcing services.

Recently, Mark Seemann, product strategy and development director at Genesis Communications, said that small firms can benefit from adopting software-as-a-service.