For the majority of IT leaders, digital transformation is an important use case for enterprise open source software, a new report from Red Hat has shown.
The company had polled 1,250 IT leaders worldwide in search of trends surrounding enterprise open source, and found digital transformation to be a growing use case (up 11 percent year-on-year).
Digital transformation was also the top non-technical IT funding priority for respondents, with more than a fifth (21 percent) accelerating their plans, which Red Hat believes could be a reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In most places around the world, the most important use case for enterprise open source remains infrastructure modernization. In the Europe, Middle East and Asia region (EMEA), however, it’s shoulder-to-shoulder with digital transformation.
While the use of open source for infrastructure modernization is no surprise, Red Hat claims momentum with regard to digital transformation was “harder to foresee”.
The motives behind shifting to open source seem to have changed in the last year, the report further states. In previous years, enterprise open source was seen, first and foremost, as a cheaper alternative to proprietary software. That is no longer the case, as price is now sixth on the list of benefits.
Instead, it is perceived by most IT leaders as a genuinely superior solution; it’s of higher quality, enables access to innovation and is safe to use.
“Collectively, it’s a recognition that enterprise open source is increasingly the future of software,” said Gordon Haff, Senior Principal Product Marketing Manager at Red Hat.
