OPEN SOURCE SERVICES (OSS) MARKET OVERVIEW
With the increasing availability of open source platforms, rising tech savvy populations, and flexibility to customize the code, the open source services market is gaining momentum across the globe. These services enable users to interact and modify the source code. As more number of users can develop a code better and more purposeful, its relevancy consequently increases.
With the ever-growing number of start-ups and their budget constraints, the open source services market is growing more rapidly as these services are mostly free of charge or are available in low budgets. Developers across the globe are increasingly using open-source software platforms as well as participating in technology and innovation to increase productivity on a personal level as well as on a shared platform. These factors are likely to bolster the growth of open source services market, during the forecast period.
Insights on Market Segments
On the basis of services, open source services market is categorized into consulting, implementation, support, maintenance, and management and training. These services are speedily gaining adoption in both, established businesses as well as the start-ups. Training, targeted ads, customization for certain additional functionalities and offering paid support, are a few ways of making money in the open source services market. Consulting services segment is estimated to contribute the largest revenue to the market, as companies operating in this market are increasingly developing strategies to make developers more aware about Linux and other open-source packages.
These services attract the end-users specifically for the five major reasons: cost, support, flexibility, community, and platform. They find their application in various industries including banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing, healthcare and life sciences, and retail and distribution. Of these, manufacturing industry contributed the largest revenue to the open source services market primarily due to the high adoption of production planning, inventory planning, and demand forecasting. The BFSI vertical is expected to adopt OSS services in investment and banking segment to reduce the IT investments.
North America is estimated to contribute the largest revenue to the open source services market in 2017. Enterprises are heavily adopting the services owing to the technological developments in the region. A growing concern in security, particularly in EMEA has led some companies to seek the open-source solutions to maintain security and data privacy in areas such as email, cloud services and file transfer.
Open Source Services Market Dynamics
Drivers
Open source services have numerous advantages; for instance, they are secure, offer better data privacy and ability of customization, and are cheaper than the proprietary solutions. These factors attract more organizations and users to adopt them. Hence, with the increasing demand, the growth of open source services market also increases.
The firms in the industry believe that an open-source product offers them the ability to ensure that the code they require is correct, and it provides them with the ability to independently verify them, unlike a proprietary software where users have to just believe on the development company code writers and their patchings to cover the right exploits.
Apart from the security assurances in open source services market, there is a scope to create more business opportunities as well. Open source solutions empower the businesses to beat their rivals in major concerns and issues such as quality, cost and flexibility of modification. The open sharing of information augments the trust level of the users in the technology.
Open-source services offer more flexibility of customization to the coders than their proprietary counterparts. Users can framework a product by themselves and then add their customized workflows as well, which is another major factor contributing to the growth of open source services market, in the coming years.
Restraints
Though, open source services are relatively cheaper, their reliability is low as they are not necessarily outcome of a recognized individual or organization. Due to this sometimes they are considered less trusted by users, which restrains the open source service market growth. Also, the kind of tools used in these services cannot be trusted, which makes weaknesses in codes difficult to detect. Solving problems also becomes inefficient because a paid consultant who has not programmed the software or worked on a source code cannot solve the problem effectively. These concerns of users are hampering the growth of open source service market.
Open Source Services Market Competitive Landscape
Some of the key players in the open source services market include Red Hat Inc., Accenture, Wipro Limited, IBM, Infosys Limited, Cisco Systems, Atos SE, HCL Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Oracle.
