Next year, open source will be used in every enterprise worldwide, say Gartner analysts in a recently released study. The survey included over 250 companies and organizations all over the globe spanning various sectors of the economy. According to the survey, 85% of companies surveyed are already using open source products. The remaining 15% are planning to introduce open source within the next 12 months.

As the main reasons for adopting open source software, participants named lower total cost of ownership, slower growth of cost-prohibitive factors and easier embarkment of new IT projects. Other reasons named were to avoid the vendor lock-in and to reach a faster time to market.

Gartner also states that only 31% of respondents have coherent strategies and concepts for introducing and evaluating open source. According to the analysts, a reason for this is the assumption of open source being free of costs which is still widespread.