“Our member CEOs have given us important insights into what they expect for the coming new year,” said Dominic Sartorio, president of the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) - a nonprofit, vendor neutral consortium dedicated to driving the interoperability and adoption of comprehensive open solutions - as the OSA today announced the findings of its 2008 Predictions Survey, which polled open-source CEOs on their forecasts for the coming year.

“The OSA is home to some of today’s most successful commercial open source companies," Sartorio continued, "which allows us to spot trends and their impact early.“

The OSA survey revealed that CEOs agree that commercial open source will become more mainstream and continue to be a worldwide growth story in 2008. Moreover, growing economic uncertainties could further expand the opportunity for open source in the enterprise.

“Demand for Linux and open-source applications, infrastructure and services will increase substantially in 2008, driven partially by an economic slowdown in the United States,” predicted Doug Levin, CEO of Black Duck Software, an open-source code management company. “These open-source solutions will be active in more corporations and SMBs in 2008 than ever before.”

“During ‘08, the pressures CIOs will face to drive greater business innovation with a fixed (or low growth) IT budget will conspire to challenge every possible traditional software license,” said Brian Gentile, CEO of JasperSoft, an open-source business intelligence application. “Open-source software can be a significant catalyst in liberating more of this maintenance budget, freeing it for use in driving new business and improved profitability.”

Michael Grove, CEO of OpenIT Works, an open-source CIO collaboration group, pointed out that the collaborative nature of open source makes it cost-effective for development. “Our challenge is to demonstrate that collabsourcing (collaborative outsourcing) will generate two to three times the savings that typical outsourcing approaches provide.”

For other key predictions from OSA member company CEOs for 2008, see next page...