Our recent survey, which aggregated the views of 100 IT leaders in the UK’s private and public sectors, revealed that more than half of respondents will spend at least 20% of their IT budget on Open Source applications and software within the next five years. Results also showed that as much as 61% of respondents intend to invest 20% or more into Open Source, with the majority – 48% – expecting to invest between 20% – 40%. 10% believe that their Open Source spend could account for as much as 60% of their total budget.
This represents a huge climb, up from the 72% of IT leaders who say that they oversee a portfolio in which just a fifth or under (0-20%) is made up of Open Source technology today. The survey also revealed that investment levels in Open Source technology will continue to rise in the long-term (the next ten years) with 16% of respondents suggesting that they expect to allocate 40-60% of their budgets to Open Source technology investment by 2023. A further 4% believe they will be allocating between 80-100% of their budgets to Open Source technology by that time.
Set against a backdrop of challenges including reduced IT budgets, a lack of IT skills and IT infrastructures burdened by complexity, this drive for future investment may well be hampered by the current levels of Open Source traction. This is reflected in 77% of respondents that indicated that they intend to invest less than 20% of their total IT spend on Open Source technology in the next 12 months. But the barriers to Open Source adoption are rife. Nearly half of IT leaders (47%) revealed that cost implications and another 43% that vendor lock in are current barriers to the adoption of Open Source technology. These leaders also indicated that a lack of in-house skills to implement Open Source solutions was holding them back, while 55% of IT leaders also agreed that that there is little to no understanding of Open Source amongst C-level decision makers outside of the IT department – potentially making it harder to justify investment into this technology to the executive level.
Overall, the research findings have shown that Open Source is definitely on the agenda for IT leaders. Yet, many IT leaders seem hesitant to invest in this technology as priority, preferring to put it off as a challenge to resolve in the medium term. The reality is of course that the sooner Open Source is adopted into an organisation’s IT Eco-System, the sooner an organisation as a whole can benefit from the flexibility, agility and cost savings associated with this type of technology. Ultimately, the benefits of Open Source software have been well documented, but there is also huge potential for any enterprise to make significant savings with regards to the total cost of ownership of their IT estate by implementing these technologies.
If you want to find out more about the future of Open Source technology investment we encourage you to download the ‘Open for Business’ insight paper by clicking, here.
What do you think about the report? Do you disagree? We’d love to hear your opinions, leave a comment below.