Report: 95% of IT leaders feel open source tools are key to strong infrastructure

A new survey by Red Hat found that cloud computing and always-on services built using the open source development model and open source code are increasingly crucial to nearly every industry. A full 95% of IT leaders say they are key to their enterprise infrastructure.

What was surprising was that 82% of IT leaders said they’d be more likely to select a vendor who contributes to the open source community, which was driven, in part, by a desire to sustain healthy open source communities. That, too, bodes well for the continued growth of open source code as an engine of innovation.

The top three uses for enterprise open source (EOS) were IT infrastructure modernization, digital transformation and application development, the survey showed. While proprietary software as a percentage of software used is expected to shrink, EOS will grow and get a big boost in emerging areas, with 80% of IT leaders expecting to increase use of it in such things as artificial intelligence, machine learning, edge and IoT.

Also, security is becoming more of an open source benefit. A full 89% of IT leaders said enterprise open source is as secure, or more secure, than proprietary software. That’s a big shift from mainstream perceptions of a decade ago around open source software security. The top benefit of today’s open source security was that teams can use well-tested open source for in-house applications.

The big takeaway of the report is that more companies will continue to bring more products to market based on open source projects because the benefits are broad and strategic and no longer mostly about lower cost of ownership, as was the case four years ago.

The survey included interviews with 1,296 IT leaders worldwide. To ensure credibility, the IT leaders were unaware that Red Hat was sponsoring the survey.

Read the full report by Red Hat.