The Colorado, Broomfield-based company’s research also indicates that significant challenges remain, however, with less than half of the top packages used by enterprises available with enterprise support options.
While a considerable amount of open source software has crept into development and data centers via developers and administrators, the study of 800 IT professionals suggests that high level IT executives are now getting involved to manage open source usage.
The report found that 58% of all respondents have an open source policy or are in the process of creating one. Not surprisingly, the frequency of policy usage increases with open source software usage, as 83% of organizations with 25 open source projects or more have an open source policy or are in the process of creating one.
While 25 might sound like a lot of open source projects, it is still below average. OpenLogic has found that its customers on average use 75 of the 230 certified open source projects available with OpenLogic Enterprise.
Its research found that the top projects used by enterprises include well known projects such as the JBoss and Apache middleware code and MySQL database, as well as less well-known projects such as the Xerces XML parser and Xalan XSTL processor.
Given the breadth of projects being used, it is perhaps not surprising that less than half of the top projects had commercial-grade support options available, although that remains a significant problem in the eyes of enterprise users.
OpenLogic’s research highlighted the top five challenges involved in implementing open source software, with choosing the best products and finding enterprise support options topping the list.
Rounding out the top five were getting open source components to work together, ensuring open source code comes from a trusted source, and managing updates of new versions.
