Microsoft and SAP lagging on open source

Angus Kidman
Monday, 02 November 2009 16:09

Business IT - Open Source

Microsoft and SAP are falling behind when it comes to taking advantage of open source technology, despite cut-throat competition in the enterprise software market, a new analysis by Gartner has found.


In a presentation on the four enterprise applications software "megavendors" -- IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP -- Gartner research vice president Yvonne Genovese said that the US and German software giants both had only "minimal" strategies for developing and supporting open source, a situation which is likely to remain the case until 2015 or beyond.

Speaking at Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Cannes, Genovese said IBM was the most sophisticated in its adoption of open source technologies and techniques. "IBM is continuing to advance itself with using and embedding and directly commercialising open source," she said.

While Oracle's proposed purchase of Sun would give it "some momentum", the other two were doing little in the open source space, Genovese said. "If you're looking for open source today you're likely not going to find anything much in an SAP or Microsoft environment."

Genovese also predicted that enterprise sales tactics from the big four will become increasingly desperate as they fight to wring more money from existing business customers and lock them permanently into a single platform.

"If you look at it, each one of these vendors has a plan to encompass the application stack from the business applications all the way down into the database," she said.

"Many of them look like they're competing for the same stack. I wouldn't be surprised if many of you find that your account reps are coming in and trying to encroach on the others on a daily basis. You are a customer and they're going to come back to you time and time again and try to get more revenue."

Those vendors will increasingly rely on the fact that tight economic times mean that businesses have little option to switch away from their existing platforms. "The ability to change things like business applications has literally gone away. Maintenance is a huge issue in the market now, because there's lock-in. Most of you are paying for the software you own every five years."

The desire to make money also meant that industry-specific solutions would be harder to come by despite those fees, Genovese said. "These vendors are serving a lot of clients in multitudes of industries with a lot of different needs. They're not necessarily looking at you and your needs."

"They are building products that fit the largest target market audience size for the least amount of functionality -- I'm right on the edge of saying generic. You have to watch how far they're going to go into industry or customer-specific capabilities."