Thoughts on Open Source Enterprise Automation Software adoption in SMEs

Frank Scavo reports on his blog today, having released a new study on adoption trends for open source business apps, where he finds an increasingly growing number of companies getting a high return on investment on their open source based implementation projects, reporting that as much as 65% of the 200 companies surveyed reached positive ROI within two years, representing one of the strongest performances for any of the 20 of so technologies surveyed this year by his company.

This is encouraging for many OSS based projects out there, and their ever growing communities formed by developers, service providers, users and adopters in general, on both sides of the marketplace: the supply side and demand side.

We still need to wait and see critical mass adoption of this special category of Open Source Software, the one that helps businesses and organizations reach higher levels of efficiency and automation, through real time integration of their processes and, in many cases allowing a 360° view of their organization's data and overall performance.

Furthermore, I think there is a battleground for Open Source Software right now, I am talking about specialized niches and processes that require highly customized solutions to be deployed efficiently in order to solve real life problems that can be effectively resolved leveraging Open Source business software.

This also poses new challenges and barriers of entrance to the adoption of open source in the enterprise, some of these issues are already mentioned by Scavo in his article, and others have more to do with the logistics of effectively delivering these products and services.