开源应用要求供应商确保支持

The 451 Group has found that despite open source stack providers' offer of a single point of software support ('a single throat to choke'), enterprise users will be increasingly looking to either their application providers or operating system vendors for the assurance of support. This finding is discussed in the first report from a new research service introduced today by The 451 Group, a New York-based technology-industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation. The 451 Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) Research Service is a first-of-its-kind service investigating both user experiences and vendor strategies as enterprise customers begin to deploy open source software.

"Whenever the topic of stack support is raised, the phrase 'single throat to choke' is never far away. In the interviews and survey conducted for this report, we asked open source end users how important it was to have a single vendor for open source support. A minority of the organizations expressed a significant level of interest in a single vendor for support," said Raven Zachary, Senior Analyst and Practice Head for Open Source at The 451 Group.

451 analysts found that it is becoming increasingly common for operating systems to include multiple open source components as part of the installation process. At the same time, application vendors are increasingly looking to deliver a complete package to their customers by bundling required third-party components in with their offerings. Consequently, The 451 Group believes the market for pure-play open source stack providers looking to support enterprise customers directly is limited.

"With existing players continuing to refine their offerings and new players entering the market, stack providers must change their business models in order to thrive in the long term. The most productive approach may be to refocus their businesses to serve other types of customers. Those that want to continue serving end users as a primary market will have to either focus on the support opportunity in a particular vertical niche or become general systems integrators, possibly via merger or acquisition," said Zachary.

451 analysts also identified a number of other trends that will have an impact on the entire open source stack provider market, including:

-- Increased vendor competition - The number of vendors that are competing in the open source stack provider market is growing.

-- Federated support models - There are so many open source projects that no single vendor can assemble the expertise to meet every customer need. Many open source stack providers can only afford to support the most popular open source components. Because of this, vendors partner to build a network of experts to meet their customers' needs.

-- Supplier commodification - Where popular open source components aren't backed by a single vendor, multiple vendors offer the same services and risk becoming commodified. Because of this, customers have regular opportunities to reevaluate the relationships with their suppliers and seek alternative suppliers.

-- Talent acquisition - Vendors wanting to provide open source services and enterprise users who are implementing open source software are increasingly seeing value in acquiring expertise through the hiring of core developers.

-- Customer ownership - The more comfortable an organization is with open source, the greater level of ownership it will take in the support process.