Survey: FOSS biz fans aching for 'enterprise-class' support
6 in 10 suits would even pay for it
Posted in Management, 16th April 2013 12:00 GMT
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The absence of enterprise-grade support for free and open-source software (FOSS) is the single biggest pain point for business customers who are using it.
That’s according to a survey by data-centre automation company Univa, which found 64 per cent of respondents were prepared to pay for supported open-source software.
The survey found 76 per cent of customers are using FOSS while 75 per cent have experienced a problem using it. Univa’s poll drew on responses from 128 companies.
According to the survey, the biggest single problem businesses are encountering with FOSS is a lack of stability – applications crashing or not working properly. Twenty-five per cent gave "stability" as the biggest reason to “pay for better quality". Also on the list was ease of use, extra functionality and bug reports and fixes.
Univa CEO Gary Tyreman said in a statement: “We have always said that users are willing to pay for quality when it comes to open source software, and the results of the survey have confirmed as such.”
Naturally Univa has an angle: its Univa Grid Engine is a commercially supported implementation of the open-source Grid Engine batch-queuing system for distributed resource management (based on the old Sun Microsystems Grid Engine). In December 2010, Oracle – Sun's new owner – put the Grid Engine code on SourceForge and passed responsibility over to the Open Grid Scheduler project. Univa wants to shepherd users of Grid Engine over to its paid-for product.
That said, the lack of a vendor standing behind most open source products has been a long-standing issue. Ironically, the absence of the kinds of support you'd get from companies like Microsoft does not seem to have been a barrier to the use of FOSS in business.
Some companies have tried to spin up stand-alone FOSS support, but we can think of few who have succeeded in the market. SpikeSource made much of providing tested and supported integrations of Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python, but the company struggled and its assets were eventually swallowed by Black Duck.
What does seem to have worked is when the distributors of open-source code have supported their own work. For example, today, we have Linux companies maintaining their Linux distros: MySQL is supported by Oracle, and PHP is supported through a packaged distro from Zend - which was co-founded by PHP core contributors.
In other cases, customers have preferred to leave the problem of support to their own in-house techies, enjoying the openness and freedom of the APIs but allowing many of the details to fall through the cracks.
However, this still leaves a gap in the market for corporate types to start flogging support for other FOSS projects that nobody really claims – for example Apache - which are popular and sometimes supported by non-profit corporations, but which do not have any links with a commercial company. ®
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COMMENTS
LO instead of MS Office...
I for one think this is a massively overlooked area... In the corporate arena to use corporate-speak, it would help migrate people away from MS-Office for starters...
Re: The FOSS bubble
People may have once been worried about Microsoft limiting their computer choices but luckily that ship has sailed. Microsoft had done a very good job of making themselves irrelevant the last five plus years. At this point its a good idea to have some FOSS skills on the resume because the days of single vendor skills lasting your whole work career are long gone. There are sure alot of MCSE praying they can make it to retirement without having to ever show how worthless they are with the command line.
Re: LO instead of MS Office...
AC: "Please think twice before posting such wild ideas..."
Disagree. I'm confident it can be done. I've worked with Office at the very highest-level on Trading Desks for Quants at mega-corps. The biggest barriers overall are Time and Macros. Yes LO isn't the best product and the future will bring other options, but the central problem is most companies are too busy to tackle it.
If we take a bank for example, you could never migrate elite users such as traders, quants, institutional sales staff & marketers, wealth managers, portfolio and risk managers etc. But there are a significant number of other staff who are mere 'consumers' of spreadsheets, word documents and presentations and NOT the content creators. Those users are mostly using Office as a Viewer with minor formatting or calculation changes. However, the accepted practice has been to give these users full versions of the products too, even if they could work equally well from PDF's / RTF's / HTML or alternative Open Office type formats etc.
If I was asked to save money for a company I'm confident I could find the savings. I would leave the power-user unaffected and focus solely on the less-sophisticated 'Consumer' users. Staff could also be downgraded to older versions of Office if re-licensing is permitted in their area. This of course implies legacy Office software can be resold, which is a contentious issue still being fought out in the courts.
At SMB's I often find myself being forced to use legacy Office versions as old as Office 2000, which is able to exchange a range of files with newer Office versions using the free 2007 Compatibility Viewer to work around file format changes. None of these legacy organizations want to purchase the new office! That would mean millions of euros of retraining costs!!!
Moreover, there's nothing to stop companies sending formatted HTML / PDF / RTF to their customers instead of Office! The latter are more likely to work in all environments too. History has shown it can dangerous to make assumptions about what versions of Office your customers are using. Early adopters of DOCX / XLSX lost contracts from sending out quotes in newer file formats that customers couldn't open!
Isn't that RedHat's business model?
Paid enterprise level support is exactly what RedHat does.
What's happening here? Do businesses say "they want us to pay how much for free software?", missing the point that they want you to pay that much for professional support with SLAs and all that sort of thing.
Or is this about the bits they don't cover - OpenOffice and all that?
Re: The FOSS bubble
>very slow and memory-consuming CORE libraries
Wow in Java. No way. You lie!
The new Office Garage series:
