Red Hat, the enterprise open source solution provider, recently released its findings from the 2022 State of Enterprise Open Source report which surveyed 1,296 IT leaders. This is the fourth year Red Hat has run the survey, which aims to help Red Hat get a better understanding of how IT leaders view enterprise open source software.

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sat down with Gordon Haff, Technology Advocate at Red Hat, to discuss the findings from this year’s State of Enterprise Open Source report and what benefits and challenges open source software poses. Haff says, “A big benefit of having enterprise open source is that we’re not downloading some random software off the internet. We have software that’s been well tested, that we can use in our applications.”

Key takeaways from this video interview are:

• The survey aims to help Red Hat understand how enterprise open source users perceive the benefits of open source software, as well as the barriers they face. Red Hat takes the findings and uses them as learning points for their own software.
• 82% of the respondents cared if their vendor contributes to open source. Reasons why it is important to them included that it indicates that the vendor is familiar with open source processes, and vendors can influence development features if needed. The vendor can also help with technical problems.
• There is a general understanding of putting back into the community in order to sustain the open source ecosystem. Ensuring that software is sustainable for enterprises’ use is also an important factor.
• Use of proprietary software is decreasing, while enterprise open source software is increasing. Community open source is also seeing increased adoption although not as quickly as enterprise open source.
• Adoption of open source AI/ML and Edge IoT is increasing. Cloud, including public cloud, is very complex and differentiated from vendor to vendor.
• Skills shortage continues to be a barrier. In the Kubernetes ecosystem, developers must be able to understand and manage CI/CI pipelines, monitoring, logging, version control, amongst other responsibilities. Being able to mitigate these different elements continues to be a challenge.
• The majority of respondents believe that open source software is at least as secure as proprietary software. Well-documented patches that are delivered quickly, was one of the reasons cited for why they believed this to be so.
• Security of the code continues to be a concern, regardless of whether it is from open source software or proprietary.
• Although not a finding in this year’s report, open source software accounts for approximately 80-90% of internal software in enterprises.

Guest: Gordon Haff (Twitter)
Company: Red Hat (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk
Keyword: Enterprise Open Source Adoption

About Gordon Haff: Gordon Haff is a technology evangelist and has been at Red Hat for more than 10 years. Prior to Red Hat, as an IT industry analyst, Gordon wrote hundreds of research notes, was frequently quoted in publications such as The New York Times on a wide range of IT topics, and advised clients on product and marketing strategies.

About Red Hat: Red Hat is an enterprise software company with an open source development model.

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.