An open source provider of enterprise content management software, Alfresco boasts more than 300 paying customers worldwide with a skew towards large, Global 2000 organizations, including Boise Cascade, Electronic Arts, the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, Kaplan, NASA, Raley's and several of the world's largest financial services companies. "The survey found that the U.S. is leading open source adoption
globally," Howells said. "We believe the Global 2000 is seeking innovation and better value for their technology investments whereas in Europe open source adoption is often driven by governments seeking better value for their citizens. The research also showed that the U.K. lags behind in the adoption of open source suggesting less government emphasis compared with other European countries such as France, Germany, Spain and Italy."
According to the survey, deployments of Red Hat have grown at a rate twice as fast as Novell SUSE since the controversial November 2006 patents and interoperability agreement announced by Novell and Microsoft. "This finding suggests that customers may not like the terms of the deal as more information became public," Howells said. The survey studied how enterprises evaluate, test and deploy both open source and proprietary software around Alfresco's enterprise content management system. Users surveyed provided unprecedented levels of detailed information on their software infrastructure, a reflection of the vibrancy of the Alfresco community. Among the highlights revealed by the open source barometer were:
- Operating systems: Surprisingly, users evaluated Alfresco as much on Windows as they did on different flavors of Linux, but they strongly preferred to deploy production systems on Linux. Windows plays an increasingly important role in testing and evaluation because it is the operating system on most desktops.
- Application servers: Users strongly preferred open source Tomcat or JBoss over the leading proprietary offerings from Sun, IBM and BEA, even in production environments.
- Databases: Overwhelmingly, users test and deploy on MySQL with PostgreSQL a surprisingly close second for both evaluations and production deployment. Oracle was the most popular proprietary choice among the proprietary databases.
- Browsers and portals: To access the Alfresco ECM repository, users preferred browsers over portals. And Firefox was the most popular choice among different browsers. When users selected a portal preference, 80 percent chose Liferay or JBoss Portal.
"Alfresco plan to survey our community on a biannual basis to deliver updates to the open source barometer," Howells said. "Our goal is to provide a leading indicator on enterprise open source adoption trends."
