EFENSYS Technologies | Application Development

Free / Open Source Operating System Survey

Overview

Over the years, especially in this decade, adoption Free / Open Source Software (FOSS) is gaining the necessary momentum in the commercial and business space. The corporate are finding FOSS equally reliable as that of proprietary software and also cost-effective.

Even though, the FOSS adoption rate is rising, it has been found out in many surveys that the FOSS adoption generally means adoption of Linux. In India, such studies are limited to bigger corporate and these studies second the findings of the international studies. There are not many studies which are trying to explore the FOSS or Linux penetration in the SMB sector.

This survey presents the current state of Linux adoption in the SMB sector companies in India. We have concentrated on BSE mid-cap firms. To start with we have limited ourselves to those firms who have their IT department located in Mumbai. This is due to the proximity advantage. As we move along with the survey, we would cover the SMB firms spanning across India.

Research Methodology & Sample Size

The survey was conducted in three ways:
  1. Telephonic Interview
  2. Sending / Receiving questionnaire through E-mail
  3. Face to face Interview

The survey was conducted on a sample of 45 companies coming under SMB who have their IT departments in Mumbai.

Survey Results

The survey gives some startling results. It gives some significant insights into the adoption of FOSS in general and Linux in particular. Following are some of the findings:

- Linux adoption in Mumbai based BSE mid-cap companies is very poor (close to 10.5%) This is in terms of total number of Linux based servers (Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat or Suse) as compared to other proprietary servers (Windows, HP UX, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, Mac OS, etc.)

- Percentage of firms having at least a SINGLE Linux-based server is about 32%.

- Overall, the survey shows that Mumbai based BSE mid-cap firms prefer MS Windows Server 2003 for their server needs. (Windows penetration is close to 80%)

- The firms have their hardware base primarily on IBM machines.

- The firms who have adopted Linux based servers prefer Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) over other forms (viz. Suse, fedora or Ubuntu). The penetration is close to 76%.

Rationale

Support issues - IT Managers have issues with the kind of support available for the Linux servers in particular and FOSS in general. The firms are skeptical about the support from the likes of Red Hat also which is in fact known for its good support.

Lack of skilled man-power - The SMB firms feel that the expertise in proprietary software (especially in MS Windows server) is abundantly available in market as compared to FOSS servers and hence they are easier to maintain.

Associated training costs - There are also huge training costs associated in developing a team for maintaining Linux servers. Linux administrator commands higher salaries as compared to Windows.

Microsoft’s Dot Net based platforms for applications. The firms having their application stack on Microsoft technologies are unwilling to move to Linux.

Migration / Integration - IT teams of these firms have migration / integration concerns with their existing software / applications.

Conclusion

Overall, there is a huge thrust currently present in the Indian SMB sector in terms of Linux adoption. The firms need to be educated about the various advantages of adopting FOSS over proprietary software. Building a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) story around various facets of the IT applications (for example, in OS servers, Application servers, ERP, etc.) might be the starting point in this journey.

Future Scope

We would be completing the survey for Mumbai-based SMB firms by May 2009. Later, we would cover the SMB firms spanning across India. We also plan to cover the penetration of FOSS in other infrastructure components in these firms (like application servers, databases, ERP, CRM, Mailing packages etc)