My fave tech industry insider, The Reg, today reports on an IDC study that indicates the recession is speeding adoption of Linux. The conclusion mirrors what we've been seeing at water&stone as well, that is, while the downturn has lead to a few people deferring projects, many have not, choosing instead to consider lower cost alternatives.
As the study put it: "IDC has found that economic downturns lead to a reduction in spending, but not necessarily an equal-sized reduction in deployments. In fact, past recessions have helped to accelerate platform shifts that were in progress."
Note, this isn't a fluffy little single digit shift in trends -- a full 72% of the firms evaluated indicated that they "are either actively evaluating or have already decided to increase their adoption of Linux on the server in 2009." Perhaps more surprising: 68% made the same claim for the desktop!
While the IDC report is focused solely on Linux adoption patterns, I would assert that the conclusions are also relevant in other open source situations, for example in the open source CMS space. The same factors that accelerate Linux adoption are also speeding the shift to open source content management systems.
We've seen several enquiries of late that say, basically, "our budget's been cut so we'd like to explore open source alternatives for completing this project." From our conversations with other vendors, it appears that they are hearing the same sort of feedback from the market.
None of this should come as a surprise. Smart firms are always exploring options to stretch their budgets and achieve better ROI. This shift to open source is overdue. Solutions like Drupal, eZ Publish, Plone, Alfresco and Magento deliver advanced functionality at very reasonable costs. It just makes good business sense from where I stand.
Comments
it's a great time to focus on Drupal
This is a tremendous justification for focusing on open source and for us at InteractiveQA for focusing more specifically on the technical implementation of Drupal social networking sites. While my friends in ad agencies tell me of companies slowing down with their marketing budgets we're at the same time seeing a growing interest in companies focusing more time, money and effort on web based social networking. It's less expensive than TV, has great ROI, gets your customers engaged with your brand, and even gets them to produce most of your content (user generated content).
Hitting the sweet spot
I cdn't agree more. I think that you guys are hitting sweet spot: the intersection of open source, content management and social media. We are seeing markedly increased interest in all 3 areas. It's not just people looking to do more with limited budgets, but increasingly, it is people shifting budget. This trend seems strongest in the area of social media marketing, as people move money from old school PR and print media, into social media.
I think it is still the early days for a lot of people in terms of social media. Very few of the people we are talking to are considering the social media factor at the time of the website build -- they are looking to craft a strategy that uses it in addition to what they already have. We get a few people who want to implement basic UGC (user generated content) and social bookmarking tools, but most lack the sophistication and the exposure to the technology. They have yet to be able to build the business case. If you guys are helping them do that, you're golden.
Thanks for posting.
-ric
RedHat earnings up 25%
RedHat is reporting a 25% jump in their annual revenues, noting "Our value proposition is even more compelling in a challenging economic environment, and we believe that's a key driver to our solid financial results and market share gains." At least, that's according to a story at ArsTechnica. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/03/red-hat-succeeding-despi...
2009 Future of Open Source presentation
North Bridge Venture Partners have released their 2009 Future of Open Source survey results. Not only is it consistent with the conclusions in this posting, but it also indicates the web content management is one of the top areas set for disruption by this trend.
The presentation can be viewed at SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/bhouse/2009-nbvp-future-of-open-source-results...