Linux continues to gain traction

While the worldwide IT market seems to be in a state of disarray, things could literally not look more positive for open source community members and the vendors, resellers and service providers involved with this revolutionary approach to software development, design and support.

And the trends towards cost cutting, operation lightening and simplification of IT are at the core of open source's potential for growth.

I have noticed in the past couple of months how companies that were previously closed to even discussing the topic of open source, have begun opening up - and I believe that economic pressure is forcing them to look to an alternative.

Front-end solutions aren't a huge focus, and as such, I'm not seeing too many queries around moving from Microsoft Office to open alternatives such as OpenOffice. This is something I believe might stem from the issues still being faced by many companies around the compatibility of file formats and macros.

OpenOffice remains a great alternative though, and unless Oracle begins making a great deal of marketing noise about it once its acquisition of Sun goes through, Microsoft will retain its strong hold on this sector of the market for some time to come.

While enquiries have been quiet on the front-end, I have seen back-end IT systems rank prominently in all discussions with customers.

I've seen a definite increase in the number of organisations looking to cut down on their proprietary Unix administration overheads by replacing existing Unix infrastructure with Linux server farms on commodity hardware.

I've also fielded a number of enquiries from customers about moving from their existing Microsoft Exchange solutions (spurred on by the costs associated with having to upgrade to the latest version of the groupware solution) to Zimbra - an open source solution that offers the same functionality, but at a far more attractive price.

The other main area of interest from customers is the viability of the MySQL database and more specifically, how they can gain relief from the escalating costs of running Microsoft SQL as a database.

And encouragingly, once customers compare the costs of the two, moving to MySQL becomes a no-brainer - the saving on licence fees associated with Microsoft SQL far outweighs the increase in services MySQL invariably requires.

Economic pressure is forcing them [companies] to look to an alternative.

Muggie van Staden is MD of Obsidian Systems.

This is all underpinned by the fact that Linux is becoming more and more accepted as the route forward, by the larger software vendors in the market. In fact SAP, Oracle and other business-critical vendors see it as a platform of choice.

For this reason, I see Microsoft becoming more of a target for the open source community than ever before. In fact, according to IDC analysts, open source will grow by 22%, to reach $8 billion by 2013.

Place this on the backdrop of Microsoft's recent slump in sales figures for its Q4 2009 (stemming predominantly from a 33% drop in sales for its Client division) and the fact that it cited the Linux operating system and the GPL licence as possible causes in its10-k submission to the SEC, and it's clear that open source is having an impact.

The next five years will be interesting, to say the least - the industry will undoubtedly be looking at a changed (and hopefully more cost-effective) IT environment by 2015.

* Muggie van Staden is MD of Obsidian Systems.