Development of Open Source Technologies and Adoption in Enterprise

Traditionally, the technology advancement/ new technology introduction was pioneered by Software Product companies and adoption in the enterprise was driven by guidance provided by the Analysts (Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc.). Possibly last such ground breaking technology change was development of "managed programming languages" namely Java and .NET introduced by Sun Microsystems and Microsoft respectively.

Since then most of the new technologies/ software has been pioneered by the open source community starting with Linux to whole bunch of JavaScript based solution now. But is there enterprise adoption at the same level like a technology development by big software houses and recommended by Analyst? The answer is probably no. 

What is the dilemma for enterprise in adopting these technologies and how can the great new technologies reach the IT landscape of enterprises.

A quick look at all the stakeholders in this - Open Source Development community, Software product companies, Analysts, Enterprises and System Integrators 

Development of Open Source

1. GAFTA companies are putting their significant IT assets in open source... Huge branding...
2. Individual contributors developing technology components for personal branding...
3. Development in Open Source with commercial packaging by new age software product companies.

Taking specific problems faced in one scenario, new solution is developed and then the community adopts and comes up with new use cases. This allows development and evolution at rapid rates, compared to development of software houses which have to put up the business case for product development ensuring widespread adoption over product lifespan to justify the investment in the engineering.

Innovation by Software Companies

With an objective of building generalized solution which would be accepted by wide range of clients, the technology products have become extremely complex and the rate of innovation has reduced like in the case of J2EE, compared to open source technology stack like Node.JS or Hadoop which has very high rate of innovation. Traditional software companies are integrating these great open source solutions into their products like Hadoop being integrated into SQL Server & Oracle databases.

These traditional software companies are also moving their software development to open source. (OpenJDK & Oracle JDK or Microsoft moving .NET in open source) So essentially the innovation in open source is driving product engineering at these companies as well, as their native product development lacking the required agility in development. 

What are Analysts saying on these new technologies?

Unfortunately, they are largely silent on open source technologies. There are no Gartner magic quadrant or Forrester Wave which analyzes these products deeply along with commercial products (baring a few commercial distributions) to give strategic advice on the technology evolution, viability and acceptability for enterprise usage.

Enterprise Adoption of these technologies

With no analyst report providing guidance on these technologies, the enterprises are struggling to define their adoption roadmap at large scale. The internal resources and skill base within the organizations is not sufficient to evaluate these technologies and make strategic decisions. So largely these technologies are being adopted by application cluster level based on specific needs of the applications and not reaching the enterprise levels.

How are System Integrators helping the adoption?

Consulting firms & Outsourcing partners play in major role in aiding technology adoption, but again most of the recommendations have been traditionally based on analyst guidance.

So what is the way forward?

What would it take for analysts to give guidance on these open source technologies? How can internal IT teams aided by system integrators make technology choices in large scale adoption? These remains as questions at this point in time.

Note: This article is my personal views based on experience and reading in this space. I have not quoted any other reference material, so that I can express myself freely.