Open Source is Becoming an Essential Part of Services Portfolios for Major Services Players, IDC Reveals

IDC: Open source is becoming a fundamental aspect of services portfolios for IBM global Services, HP Services (HPS), Unisys, Novell, and other major services providers. Open source is moving up on the investment agenda of companies worldwide, as services providers (mostly services arms of technology companies) have formalized support, training, and certification services to encourage adoption of open source (principally Linux) on their products. As open source software goes mainstream, services vendors must further develop open source capabilities in order to meet their clients’ needs and attract new customers.

A more widespread adoption of Linux and open source software is encouraged by the increasing availability of a much stronger set of external support, training, consulting, and implementation services- The Services Opportunity. There is no longer any doubt that enterprises are trying to take advantage of the quality, flexibility, and license cost savings that open source software offers. However, they have to take into consideration integration, maintenance, and support costs while deploying and managing their open source infrastructure.

As the adoption increases, services providers are working to become their clients’ single point of contact for all of their open source initiatives. They are also creating more refined offerings, including preintegrated stacks of open source or mixed-source components, and are supporting them.

Recommendations for services providers:

• Open source will become business as usual in two to three years, so act today and create direct open source services offerings and embed open source in your solutions where you canBe creative with a new services revenue model, as there is no new industry-wide accepted approach yet

• Look beyond support as a way to differentiate yourself

• Learn the art of componentry, and extend the functionalities of an open source core with commercial plug-ins or extensions, or vice versa

• Demonstrate your commitment to open source and open standards, as open source is at the core of trends toward standardization, optimization, consolidation, and rationalization of the IT infrastructure

worldwide Open Source Services 2006 Vendor Analysis: The Open Source Services Opportunity

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