According to Red Hat’s latest status report, companies prefer open source software over proprietary offerings when it comes to modernizing their IT.
The Results of the “State of Enterprise Open Source 2021” survey are present. For the third edition of the report, Red Hat asked the executives of around 1,250 IT companies in 13 countries how decision-makers assess the current and future role of open source software in their companies. Respondents are not necessarily customers of Red Hat, whose business model is built on open source. The report is published annually and is an inventory of how companies use open source software, what advantages they see in it and what reservations or conflicts exist in their companies at the same time.
Digitalization as an ambassador for open source
Four core statements stand out: For most respondents (53%), the digital transformation was the reason to rely on open source: 11 percent more than two years ago. The majority of them consider Enterprise Open Source to be an “innovation driver”, because on the one hand, according to their own statements, they are increasingly using it to modernize their outdated IT infrastructure, and on the other hand they believe that Enterprise Open Source in particular offers higher quality and more advanced technologies. According to the report, security concerns play a major role in the preference for open source software over proprietary programs. In addition, the potential closer proximity of the providers to the communities behind the open source projects seems to have been important to the respondents.
Focus on security aspects
90 percent of the respondents said they were IT decision-makers to use public domain software in their companies. Around a third each said they considered the quality of open source to be higher (35%) and hoped that it would give them access to the latest innovations (33%). 30 percent each consider software with freely accessible source code to be generally safe and their own use of open source technologies in the company also seems safe to them. A total of 87 percent said they trust open source software and find it at least as secure or more secure than proprietary alternatives.
Around 80 percent expect the use of open source software in their companies to increase over the next two years will continue to increase. In the area of Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing, executives expect an increase from today’s 55 to 72 percent, in the area of machine learning from today’s 48 to 65 percent within two years.
Kubernetes and containerization
According to the survey, Kubernetes plays a prominent role in cloud computing: 85 percent of those surveyed consider Kubernetes to be the key to cloud-native applications, the “lingua franca” so to speak. of the cloud (to quote Loris Degioanni from Sysdig, who recently presented a large code donation to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation). In detail, 66 percent stated that they rated Kubernetes as “very” or “extremely important” to keep, while only one percent rated Kubernetes as irrelevant. Red Hat survey participants also expect to see container use grow more in the future: 72 percent of respondents expect container use to grow, with 30 percent predicting a large increase in containerization.
Gordon Haff, senior product manager at Red Hat, published the report in commented on a blog entry and has seen a common thread since the first issue: Overall, according to him, quality, innovation and security were decisive when IT decision-makers in companies chose open source. The active involvement of vendors in the further development of open source software appears to provide key incentives, and in general enterprise open source has a good reputation and potential for future growing use in companies.
The detailed results and the underlying data can be viewed in the report. A selection of the highlights can also be viewed as animated infographics. If you want to delve even deeper, you can also take a look at Red Hat’s Global Tech Outlook 2021 for comparison: In the report, 1470 IT decision-makers disclosed where their company is currently in the digital transformation.
