Survey: enterprises evolve how they buy open source support
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jul 22, 2008 at 6:29am
OpenLogic, a provider of open source solutions has announced the results of a survey of corporate open source users regarding open source support.
The survey was conducted in June of 123 enterprise users of open source software. Half of the respondents came from organizations with more than 1,000 employees. Respondents included systems and application architects, IT executives and managers and developers from a wide range of organizations.
OpenLogic’s research found that enterprise users of open source software have been accustomed to getting their support directly from the open source community or from their own internal support resources. However, a majority of respondents from larger enterprises saw having a support vendor as important. Additionally, although the most common support resources used were internal resources and open source mailing lists, a significant minority of respondents use commercial open source vendors. Still, many respondents also felt that open source support was harder to obtain.
When comparing open source support to support for traditional, non-open source software, the vast majority of respondents reported that open source support was of equal or better quality. Support issues for open source were more frequently about configuration, integration and performance than about software defects.
Among the findings of the survey:
° Most open source support questions are not about software defects: more respondents needed help “often” or “very often” with configuration (27.9 percent), integration (27.9 percent) or performance (26 percent) issues, than for software defects (22 percent)
° Enterprises use internal support or community support most often, and report trouble finding open source support: respondents “often” or “very often” turned to internal support resources (56 percent of respondents), internal developers (52.2 percent of respondents) and community resources (54.8 percent of respondents). Enterprises accessed external OSS vendors (10.4 percent of respondents) and IT consultants (10.3 percent of respondents) much less frequently. In addition, a majority over half of respondents report difficulty in finding OSS support “sometimes”, “often” or “always”, which may explain the lower usage of vendors to resolve issues.
° Larger enterprises see OSS vendor support as more important: over 50 percent of respondents in mid-size and large companies (1,000 employees or more), see an open source vendor as “very important” or “required.” In comparison, only 39 percent of respondents across all company sizes felt that vendor support was “required” or “very important.”
° Enterprises report highest satisfaction with support from internal resources: more than half of the respondents were “satisfied” or “extremely satisfied” getting support from either internal developers within their own company (60.8 percent); other internal support resources (58.6 percent); or open source project mailing lists and message boards (49.1 percent). Commercial open source support followed with 38 percent reporting being satisfied. Respondents also report internal resources as being the quickest to resolve issues.
° OSS support is harder to find: more than half of the respondents felt that open source software is about the same (26.1 percent) or harder (37.4 percent) to obtain than commercial proprietary software support.
° OSS software is high quality: Users felt that the quality of open source software is the same (43.5 percent of respondents) or better (35.7 percent) than proprietary software.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
