'Dynamic IT' paving the way for open source, says IDC

This afternoon at a breakout session atOSBC, IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky talked about the confluence of trends paving the way for what he called "dynamic IT." In particular, the drive to lower costs and the requirement that IT prove real business value taken together have made quite an impact, he said. "We find organizations are asking tough questions to their IT staff," said Kusnetzky, giving examples like, "Are we doing the right things?" or, "Are we efficiently doing the wrong things?" Dynamic IT goes under a variety of buzzwords but they all essentially mean the same thing: flexible, scalable, and powerful infrastructures that are inherently vendor, OS, and architecture neutral, according to the analyst.

Kusnetzky talked about the Linux ecosystem in which he showed that if you consider deployments of Linux that produced revenue, 55% share belongs to Windows and about 20-23% belongs to Linux. But when you add in non-paid Linux shipments thenits share jumps up considerably.He said that organizations are interested in the lower cost that open source offers, "but the real costs are in the IT staff needed to support it."