Open Source Kind to IT Budgets: SurveyOpen Source Kind to IT Budgets: Survey

This will be a good year for open-source applications, results from a mid-December Open Source Alliance (OSA) survey reveal. For budget-conscious SMBs that can?t afford enterprise-size solutions, this is also good news."With economic conditions looking a little rougher this year, there will be a focus on open source as a money-saving thing," OSA president Dominic Sartorio told ChannelWeb.

Smaller companies, he said, ?can't afford Oracle or SAP, but [they] can pull together at low cost comparative functionality from these open-source vendors."

Interoperability and customization of open-source solutions are also top of mind for SMBs, which need to leverage the systems they already have in place.

?Open-source software can be a significant catalyst in liberating more of this maintenance budget, freeing it for use in driving new business and improved profitability,? said Brian Gentile, CEO of JasperSoft, in a statement.CMP Channel, Open Solutions Alliance