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Open Source – The Future of Software As A Service

Not a day goes by that there isn’t some news about SaaS and content management. Maybe it’s a new vendor in the market, or maybe it’s an existing vendor moving into online service offerings. What we came across today in Matt Asay’s blog, The Open Road, took us a bit by surprise.

According to Matt’s blog, analyst firm Gartner has done a 360 and seems a little more “open” to open source technology. In a research note, Gartner reports that 90% of SaaS providers will use Open Source components in their offerings by 2010.

Specifically open source technologies will be used in the operating system, application servers and databases as a way of cutting costs. They say that 30% of a SaaS application will be open source based.

Robert DeSisto, vice president at Gartner, said: “The more SaaS vendors use open source in the technology stack, the lower their software acquisition cost becomes.”

In a PCWorld article, Gartner analyst Yefim Natis says that in order for SaaS vendors to compete with proprietary on-premise solutions, they need to be able to offer better pricing. Using open source technologies allows them to do that.

In addition, Gartner says that SaaS vendors are strong technically. This enables them to better utilize open source technologies without a lot of support. The same can’t be true, they say, for enterprises.

All this is good news for open source. However, open source providers need to be wary as SaaS providers may be taking away some of their business. Gartner says that moving to a services model requires less IT skills for an enterprise, while moving to “open source often demands the opposite”.

And so we see the dynamics of competition changing yet again. No longer is it just open source against proprietary solutions for better cost savings, it’s now SaaS against open source for the same reasons.

Gartner has come a long way from the days when they discounted both open source and SaaS in the enterprise. And this was just late last year!