Open source key driver of SaaS

Software as a service (SaaS) is the talk of the day and it will increase in its popularity since there a scope of opensource to push it higher and higher.

Gartner predicts that SaaS will be driven by opensource in the future. And the prediction is supported by facts and figures.

By 2010, 90 percent of software as a service (SaaS) providers will have some open-source component in their technology infrastructure stacks (that is, operating system, application server and database) to reduce software acquisition expenses, according to Gartner, Inc.

User communities are expanding around application-platform-as-a-service providers and will leverage open-source practices for sharing software applications.

As the number of software as a service users increase the opensource support will also grow along with it, definitely.

The more SaaS vendors use open source in the technology stack, the lower their software acquisition cost becomes. Users, however, should not expect cost savings to be passed on to them in the form of lower prices. Vendors may choose to improve profitability or increase R&D efforts with their savings."

USERS POINT OF VIEW

open-source-like applications will constitute at least 30 percent of an application as a service provider's ecosystem of available applications built on the provider's native platform. This is the infancy of application-as-a-service SaaS platforms and their corresponding ecosystems. The combination of platforms and ecosystems will foster communities that will leverage open-source practices.

It is also important that IT organizations take an active role in governing the use of any open-source SaaS offering, specifically to ensure that the company using the offering is properly indemnified from any downstream patent infringement actions from the open-source elements that the SaaS providers are using."