Consumerisation of IT will boost open source uptake

More than a decade ago, open source changed software development and the economies of software at infrastructure level. Today, that disruption is ripping its way through companies at the business application level. We see adoption of open source growing more than ever as the economy puts new pressure on CIOs and IT managers to purchase the most cost-effective technology.

But that adoption is also growing because open source software is mature and feature-rich – it has both the technical and business merit to be integrated and deployed in any business environment.

So is this the answer to organisations’ software needs? Not quite. First we need to look at the expectations of a new generation of workers – and examine how open source software can help the software market and community meet those expectations.

Simply put, enterprise information systems are beginning to require a simpler, more consumer-oriented approach to appeal to the younger generation of workers. I refer to it as the consumerisation of information. The concept is based on a workforce demographic shift that is becoming more pronounced. As the aging workforce in the largest economies retires and young workers enter and climb higher, we will see a widening “expectation gap” between the anticipated and actual behaviour of enterprise applications.

Younger workers have grown up with computers and the internet. Therefore, their expectations of how software systems should behave are vastly different from an older worker who has grown into computers and software. For this reason, software vendors who design products that work according to new web principles will fare well with this younger generation of workers. This is where open source comes in. Only the open source development model is flexible and transparent enough to quickly cater to these new expectations.

Open source software is community-based and is often rapidly updated by a body that has many thousands of members. The resulting broad ideas, collaboration and rapid, interactive development make open source software companies inherently equipped to address the need for more consumer-oriented enterprise apps. Software dinosaurs simply cannot move fast enough to provide the features that today’s workforce expects.

I predict that the next decade of open source growth will be driven by what the next generation is teaching us about how to make web-based software services work for them. The open source development model is the only way we will enable them to work in a way they expect, and to build tomorrow’s innovations quicker than we might have imagined.

Brian Gentile is the CEO of Jaspersoft