14 DAY TRIAL // The first global survey of trends in the use of open source software in the enterprise domain is now available, thanks to Alfresco Software Inc. The survey's results revealed something that most of the open source community members already knew, the fact that Linux has a highly increasing popularity, coming to replace Windows in more and more enterprises.
According to Alfresco's survey, most enterprises use Windows now only as evaluation platform for open source software, but when it comes of going into production they choose Linux. The poll started this April and lasted till June and it was conducted on almost 10,000 of the 15,000 Alfresco community members.
Ian Howells, CMO, Alfresco Software Inc. stated about the research's results:
"The survey shows there is a clear leader at each level of the open source stack but also indicates an increasing trend for organizations to adopt a mixed stack, combining both open source and proprietary software, to enable use of best of breed components...The survey also illustrated that organizations require the flexibility to make component changes within the stack between evaluation and deployment phases. "
According to www.ciol.com, the questioned persons responded they prefer open source Tomcat or JBoss over the products from Sun, IBM and BEA, even in the production environments. Regarding the browsers used for Internet surfing, the users claimed they are with Mozilla Firefox. Asked about what portal they prefer, most users pointed to Liferay or JBoss.
Not surprisingly, the survey also revealed that deployments of Red Hat have grown twice as fast as Novell SUSE's since the controversial November 2006 patents and interoperability agreement closed with Microsoft. The research also revealed a hesitation that the U.K. has regarding the adoption of open source solutions when compared with other European countries such as Italy, France, Germany or Spain.