Open Source Adoption by Corporations?

shakuni asks: "I work for a large network equipment vendor in the operations software business unit. One of the questions that I have been asking all my customers (large telecom service providers) is their position on adoption of open source software in their operations environment. The customers that I have interviewed don't comprise a a large enough sample to make sweeping statements. However, most large service providers (who have probably more than 80% of $1 trillion telecom market worldwide) seem very wary of open source, even though the high cost commercial software is hitting on them hard. How is open source adoption being encouraged amongst the financial and telecom behemoths, who are averse to taking risks with their IT systems? Are there specific organizations out there that actively address the IT manager and CTOs concerns about open source software? In other words, is there an enterprise Open Source initiative that pro-actively helps companies move in this direction?"

Comments

Not Strategic, Yet

[4of12]

I can't speak for telecoms.

But what I've seen is open source deployment at the grass-roots level. Acceptance is a gradual, building thing with exposure working its way slowly upon the organizational hierarchy.

Smaller company CIO's and smaller organizational subunits in large corporations are willing to take gradually increasing potential risks by utilizing open source.

The irony is stealth deployment cuts both ways.

One of the reasons it's easier to take that risk with open source is that deployment doesn't require visible commitment of dollars. That Samba or Apache server just cranks away, no invoices come in, no need to count licenses to be compliant, etc. And it sure doesn't hurt that many open source applications are as reliable as death and taxes; they don't drop service causing the CIO to fume about not being able to get service.

But by the same token, those open source deployments are largely invisible to people higher up; those people are less familiar with the successes and failures and are therefore not yet ready to jump in the water headfirst.

Not at the corporate level, but developers do

[HeroicAutobot]

The company I work for, which has an IT shop of about 400 people, is very leery about adopting open source software at the enterprise level (except for Apache). Some of us are working to change this, but we have a lot of FUD to overcome.

However, nearly every developer here uses open source tools daily. JUnit and Ant are everywhere, as well as NUnit, NDoc, and NAnt for the .NET folks. Eclipse is gaining ground, and Emacs use is pretty common.

For one project, the dev team created a post-project list of all the software used during development. Out of about 30 programs (including DB, OS, etc), 2/3rds were open source.

For my telecom....

[Sevn]

It was simply common sense. We had three independant firms calculate the cost out over the next 5 years. It basically panned out like this:

Microsoft: 15 million
Sun: 10 million
Redhat ES 3.0 on DL380's: 2 million

We had briefly toyed with the idea (seriously though) of using Debian instead of Red Hat, but some of our proprietary hardware was only supported by Red Hat. I can safely say that the level of technical acumen and common sense here made SCO's hilarious blatherings have exactly zero impact in any of our decision making.

As a network administrator

[adamvjackson]

As a network administrator for a medium-sized medical office, I have recently been migrating users of Microsoft Office 2000 to OpenOffice.org 1.1.0, and MSSQL to MySQL. So far adoption of OpenOffice.org has been going better than I had expected.

Remember your history

[Brandybuck]

Remember your history. Remember how long it look for Windows to get accepted by the large corporations. Heck, even the desktop PC was a "courageous" decision by some one.

Windows "trickled" up from the home into the small business, and from there to the medium and large corporations. Don't worry about the big buys.