BY AMIT ROY CHOUDHURY

THERE is growing interest in open source software (OSS) in Singapore, led by demand from small and medium enterprises. And this trend is likely to continue over the next 18 months, according to a study by IT research agency IDC.

Speaking to BizIT, IDC's Ridhi Sawhney said verticals such as manufacturing, government, telecommunications and financial services are also either adopting or evaluating OSS in Singapore and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific.

'The public sector has started to consider open source, not only because of obvious cost reasons but also to build an eco-system, lower the barrier to entry and promote the adoption of OSS,' said Ms Sawhney, who is IDC Asia-Pacific's program market analyst.

According to her, the four most sought-after OSS applications in Singapore are supply chain management, business intelligence/analytics, operating systems and virtualisation software.

'There is almost nil adoption of enterprise resource management, customer relationship management, database management software and middleware in Singapore,' she said.

In the whole IT stack, from the operating system to the application layer, OSS adoption rates vary, she explained.

'Open source is more prevalent at infrastructure level where there is not much of a support requirement. Distributors of Linux, like Red Hat and Novell, have established their presence and are perceived as reliable options.

'Linux is considered secure and companies have started using it even for mission-critical applications.'

Moving up the stack to database and middleware, there are very few instances of OSS implementation, Ms Sawhney said. 'But since the start of the economic crisis there has been a noticeable change in the number of OSS downloads compared with before, when open source was not so popular. However, the application layer still shows very little open source adoption.'

The majority of organisations adopting OSS in Singapore are SMEs, she said. 'Responding to our study, a large number of SME respondents said they plan to adopt open source over the next 18 months.'

Talking about the vendor side of OSS, she noted that in Singapore, apart from large vendors like Red Hat, Sun and EnterpriseDB, who have direct regional presence, other players rely heavily on partners.

Ms Sawhney noted that Alfresco, the open source alternative for enterprise content management, has installations in Singapore. EnterpriseDB, on the other hand, has a presence via partners. The US-based company, was founded in 2004, provides products and solutions based on the open source database PostgreSQL.

The other well-known OSS vendors, Novell, Sun and Red Hat have a direct presence in Singapore. In fact, Red Hat has its regional headquarters here.

One of the chief fears surrounding commercial use of OSS is a perceived lack of internal and external skills to support the shift to OSS strategy.

'IDC finds that organisations would be more likely to subscribe to hardware or software support services to support open source software,' Ms Sawhney said. 'This is closely followed by application management/outsourcing and training/education services.'

This article was first published in The Business Times.