Yes to Open Source, No to SaaS: Which IT Alternatives Will You Adopt?Yes to Open Source, No to SaaS: Which IT Alternatives Will You Adopt?

Open source software is the most accepted among five IT alternatives -- already in use by 42% of those surveyed -- while cloud computing is at the bleeding-edge -- in use by 14% of respondents. What's a bit surprising, however, is that software as a service (SaaS) is on more "not likely to consider" lists (49%) than is the cloud (47%). These are just a few of the findings of our "Attitudes and Priorities" survey, which is based on interviews with more than 300 readers with responsibility for enterprise IT purchases.

Joining open-source software, SaaS and the Cloud on our list of five IT alternatives are social networking tools (blogs, microblogs, wikis, RSS, etc.) and rich Internet applications (mashups, Ajax, Flash/Flex, Silverlight, etc.). As you can see (click on the thumbnail image below), we asked 305 respondents to tell us which ones they are using, which ones they're considering and which ones are on the "don't go there" list. (In case you were wondering, 54% of the respondents were from companies with 1,000 or more employees, and 30% were from firms with 10,000 or more employee. Job titles broke out as follows: 60% IT, 17% business, 8% consultant, 15% "other" or unspecified.)

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Adoption of Emerging Technologies

Given that our guiding open-source description included Linux and MySQL, we're not surprised to see the high adoption figure. Somewhat more surprising was the 14% who said cloud computing was in use; we hope they weren't counting use of SaaS, given that it was listed right there as a separate category, but perhaps our guiding suggestion of "database, storage, etc." wasn't clear enough.

As for the SaaS/cloud fear factor, it's almost shocking to find that nearly half of respondents say they're not likely to consider either option. We hope it's not a Luddite response from folks who think SaaS or cloud options might threaten their jobs. We couldn't go deeper on that question because this was just one small subtopic in a much larger survey covering information management, business intelligence, enterprise applications and process management.

To find out more about what your peers are thinking and doing -- what they are struggling with and what are they putting at the top of their agendas -- download the free "Attitudes and Priorities" report.Open source software is the most accepted among five IT alternatives -- already in use by 42% of those surveyed -- while cloud computing is at the bleeding-edge -- in use by 14% of respondents. What's a bit surprising, however, is that software as a service (SaaS) is on more "not likely to consider" lists (49%) than is the cloud (47%). These are just a few of the surprising findings of our "Attitudes and Priorities" survey, which is based on interviews with more than 300 readers with responsibility for enterprise IT purchases.