A survey of 200 IT decision-makers from medium to large enterprises was conducted in Q1 of 2021 by Vanson Bourne and sponsored by Percona in advance of Percona Live ONLINE 2021, which started today!
Percona Live Online represents dozens of projects, communities, and tech companies, and features more than 150 expert speakers across 200 sessions. There’s still time to register and attend.
In his keynote address on May 12 at Noon Eastern, Peter Zaitsev, CEO of Percona, addressed the findings of the survey in more detail, along with the impact of licensing changes and the importance of keeping open source truly open.
The survey focused on the business perspective of open source software. 25% of respondents were from medium-sized enterprises (500-999 employees) and 75% were from large enterprises (over 1,000 employees).
The Benefit of Open Source
Respondents came from a cross-section of industries and had knowledge of open source software. Their answers showed that enterprises have a deep appreciation for the value of open source software.
100% of information technology (IT) decision-makers said that “using open source provides benefits for their organization.”
78% of respondents reported their use of open source software had increased over the past disruptive 12 months.
Cloud Adoption
Large enterprise respondents were most likely to have moved databases and applications to cloud services. Just 13% of large enterprises continue to have all their databases and applications running at their on-premises data center, compared with 29% of medium-size enterprises.
The transition to the cloud was accelerated by the worldwide pandemic and demand for flexible, fast, and reliable technology. However, it’s likely the increase in demand led to an increase in costs for many businesses. 68% of respondents said that cloud infrastructure has become more expensive in the past year.
The survey asked how public cloud providers can contribute back to open source. 59% said by providing better security, 48% said by encouraging open source collaboration, 43% said by improving existing code quality and 43% said by enabling open source to run on their cloud.
Licensing Changes
Nearly half of survey respondents indicated concerns over changing open source licenses, such as the Business Source License (BSL) and Server Side Public License (SSPL). They indicated that it will increase costs (44%); it encourages lock-in (37%); discourages engagement from the open source community (34%); and discourages growth in the open source market (26%).
