By 2017, about 90 per cent of Indian IT organisations will have open source software (OSS) embedded in their mission critical platforms.
In India, traction of OSS is rising and its use has become more strategic for internal usage as well as for client-facing systems, according to a study by Gartner, which was not released to the media.
“Earlier, it was to replace some legacy applications but now organisations are looking to reduce costs by using OSS. It would be used quite uniformly across sectors and mainly by sectors without proper exposure to software vendors,” said Gartner Principal Research Analyst Asheesh Raina.
Gartner defines open source as a software released under licences and terms defined by the Open Source Initiative. The software can be modified and redistributed by users in compliance with the original licence.
The implementation of OSS involves a trade-off between investments versus time saved. Apart from the cost savings, the reasons to use OSS include increased return on investments and reduced total cost of ownership.
Education segment The education segment in India has been the most active in exploring OSS, followed by banking, financial services and insurance and government.
Indian enterprises are using OSS for internal data centre expansion, while many retailers use open source to develop healthcare check-up solutions for their point-of-sale terminals.
The majority of public and private educational institutions use OSS for library automation, and several research organisations in India use OSS in the drug discovery space.
Indian small or mid-size businesses use OSS as client-facing service portals, while the majority of Indian government offices are directing new initiatives that involve use of open-source software and solutions.
The large IT companies such as Wipro, Infosys and Tech Mahindra are already using OSS to test software for clients.
Gartner predicts that by 2016, OSS will be included in mission-critical software portfolios within 99 per cent of global 2000 enterprises, up from 75 per cent in 2010.