gartner

90 percent of SaaS providers to use open source by 2010

Gartner seems to have checked its former open-source blindness at the door, and is now suggesting that 90 percent of all software-as-a-service providers will adopt open source in their infrastructure by 2010.

Cost cutting will lead to the move, said (Gartner)...Open source will be used in the operating system, application server, and at a database level and will make up 30 percent of an application.

Of course it will. Open source is the foundation of software innovation in the 21st century.

One big question remains, however: will open source provide SaaS' free lunch or will there be a quid … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 701: Doughnut for your hate

Flickr-haters get free doughnuts. If that's what you get for hating, sign us up! Also, Gartner hates on Windows, and no one gets any doughnuts for that. Europe rejects plans to criminalize file-sharing, offering doughnuts in the form of broad exemptions for fair use, and Network Solutions gets a big, fat doughnut hole for putting ads on your subdomains. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 701

Mike Please keep doing the show.

Windows is ‘collapsing,’ Gartner analysts warn http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-9916717-56.html http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1870375122;fp;;fpid;;pf;1 http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8428… Read more

"Windows is too monolithic," declares Gartner, opening the door for Linux

"The Innovator's Dilemma" is finally catching up with Microsoft. As Gartner analyst Michael Silver declares (and ZDNet's Larry Dignan captures),

Microsoft's Windows juggernaut is collapsing as it tries to support 20 years of applications and becomes more complicated by the minute. Meanwhile, Windows has outgrown hardware and customers are pondering skipping Vista to wait for Windows 7. If Windows is going to remain relevant it will need radical changes...."Windows is too monolithic," says Silver.

That monolithic nature will become ever less relevant as more and more applications are written for the web...and simply won't care what OS is running on the client. Gartner figures that 2011 will represent a tipping point when developers will care more about developing for the Web than for the desktop.

Ironically, Gartner's recommendations for how Windows should change sound eerily like a recommendation to become...Linux:

Windows should be able to be tailored to specific applications. Linux has been doing this for years, modular as it is. Linux reigns in embedded devices and scales up to the most demanding high-performance computing needs. Whatever the application, Linux has been tailored to fit it. Windows can't compete.… Read more

Gartner: The good news and the even better news about open source

Paula Rooney of ZDNet has some bad news for those promoting Linux. According to a Gartner report, Linux's cost advantages are soon to dissipate and software as a service will soon eclipse Linux as "the preferred IT cost-cutting method" (by 2013).

If true, in both cases Linux and open source win. What's not to love?

In the first instance, open source long ago ceased to be dependent on winning through cheapness. Yes, many CIOs still look to open source to deliver cost savings, but people aren't switching to Novell and Red Hat to save a buck, just as few (if any) have outright dumped Red Hat's for Oracle's discount Unbreakable Linux.

It's not about a price tag. It's about value, as Red Hat's Michael Tiemann emphatically stated at OSCON a few years back.

If Linux's TCO goes up relative to its proprietary competition, so has its value. Perhaps Gartner is simply predicting that Linux vendors will finally get paid their due?

This isn't exactly how Gartner sees it:… Read more

PC shipments to rise 11 percent in 2008

Worldwide PC shipments will hit 293 million units in 2008, up 10.9 percent from 2007, due in part to sales in emerging markets, Gartner said Tuesday.

And although price cuts will occur, revenue will grow around 6 percent for the year, George Shiffler, research director at the firm, said in a phone interview.

That's a good sign. In recent years, revenue has stayed flat from year to year despite unit shipment increases. In 2003, for instance, a then-record 152.6 million PCs were shipped, but they carried an estimated value of $175 billion, or about the same as … Read more

Grading the analysts

Sam Lawrence, Jive's chief marketing officer, has issued a report card for two analyst firms with which Jive works. Net net? Forrester is pretty engaged with its clients (and non-clients), and Gartner, apparently, is not.

I've talked about analysts on this blog before, and don't want to spend more cycles denigrating their work. Like Sam, I've found Forrester to be particularly good. Forrester has actively talked with Alfresco despite the fact that we're not clients.

Perhaps Forrester recognizes that there's more to a market than the incumbents (though, as Sam found, no analysts with which we've worked have been all that interested in actually talking to our customers). After all, we're often the ones exerting a big influence but don't want to spend money on buying our way onto an analyst's report. … Read more

Gartner: Most commercial apps to embed open source by '12

Gartner has made 10 technology predictions for the next few years, and in the analyst firm's view, life has never been better for open source.

Among the predictions: Apple will double its market share by 2011 and software-as-service will account for at least one-third of all business software spending by 2012.

But it was open source's gain that I found most interesting. Gartner doesn't speculate on how much open-source vendors will make or anything like that. Rather, Gartner talks about how much open-source code will make it into those bastions of proprietary, so-called "commercial software":

By 2012, 80 percent of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology. Many open-source technologies are mature, stable and well supported. They provide significant opportunities for vendors and users to lower their total cost of ownership and increase returns on investment.

Ignoring this will put companies at a serious competitive disadvantage. Embedded open source strategies will become the minimal level of investment that most large software vendors will find necessary to maintain competitive advantages during the next five years.… Read more

Gartner's predictions leave plenty for Microsoft to worry about

Let's start with a disclaimer. Five-year forecasts are nearly always wrong and I have no reason to think Gartner's will be any different. Things tend to happen much faster or much slower than people initially forecast.

That said, if Gartner is even close to on point, there are plenty of trends that could be worrisome for Microsoft. First and foremost is the research firm's prediction that Apple will double its U.S. and western Europe market share by 2011.

Also of concern to folks in Redmond should be some of Gartner's other predictions. One is that … Read more

Tech spending set to plunge

In what should be a boon to commercial open-source software vendors, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that tech spending is set for a big slowdown in 2008. Just as a housing and credit crunch should lead to more prudent consumer spending, so, too, should economic malaise at the corporate level lead to more intelligent IT spending.

In other words, less silly spending on licensed shelfware and more savvy spending on real value: open source and SaaS that focus on actual service, not licenses. Proprietary software's loss can be open source's gain:

Last week, IDC cut its 2008 projection for world-wide tech-spending growth to between 5.5% and 6%, down from a previous forecast of 6.6% and from this year's expected growth of 6.9%.… Read more