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Open Source Gains Edge in Alfresco Survey

Alfresco Software, a provider of open source enterprise content management solutions, conducted a survey of its "Alfresco community members" on the use of open source software in the enterprise. Alfresco community members can be anyone who signs up to access resources at Alfresco's website.

The survey, called "Open Source Barometer," compiled the responses of 10,000 of the 15,000 Alfresco community members from April through June 2007.

Most (60.3 percent) of the respondents planned to use Alfresco's solution on the Microsoft Windows operating system. However, the answers changed when the community was asked about their evaluation and deployment intentions. For purposes of evaluation, respondents were split between a preference for the Linux OS (43 percent) and Windows (42 percent). For deployment, respondents preferred Linux (52 percent) over Windows (29 percent).

"Windows plays an increasingly important role in testing and evaluation because it is the operating system on most desktops," explained Dr. Ian Howells, Alfresco's chief marketing officer, in the survey results.

In analyzing the survey's overall results, Howells found that it showed "an increasing trend for organizations to adopt a mixed stack, combining both open source and proprietary software."

The survey found the following specific results:

  • Application servers. Respondents greatly preferred Tomcat (72.1 percent), with the next closest choice being JBoss Application Server (19.8 percent). Trailing at single digits was Sun Java System Application Server, BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, and IBM WebSphere Community Edition.
  • Databases. Respondents preferred the open source MySQL (61.9 percent). Other contenders included proprietary systems such Oracle Database Server (14.3 percent) and Microsoft SQL Server (11.8 percent).
  • Portals vs. browsers. Respondents preferred to access content in Alfresco's enterprise content management system using a browser (58 percent) compared with a portal (42 percent). Firefox was the browser of choice, and the portal of choice was JBoss Portal (51 percent) and Liferay Portal (32 percent).

An executive summary of the report is available here. Alfresco plans to conduct its Open Source Barometer survey twice per year.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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