According to Unisys experts, 2007 will be the year that open source software attains the architectural backing and distribution channels needed to gain acceptance from enterprise customers as a front-rank vehicle for deploying enterprise applications to drive business growth and innovation at a lower cost per transaction.

“There are literally hundreds of thousands of open source projects in the world today, and it’s accelerating rapidly in sophistication and acceptance,” said Anthony Gold, vice president and general manager, Open Source Business, Unisys. “Until now, Linux has been one of the most mature and widely adopted elements. In 2007, Unisys sees the entire open source stack attaining a similar inflection point in adoption for critical mainstream business solutions such as business intelligence and enterprise content management.”

Forecasting the year ahead, Unisys executives predict that:

1. Architectural Approaches to Open Source Will Begin to Predominate

While increasingly mature and accepted in mainstream enterprises, open source software – even Linux – too often proves suboptimal for enterprise-level applications if deployed in random pieces. Enterprise computing requires production environments that provide security and even more basic functions such as lockdown, backup/restore and other enterprise computing infrastructure requirements.

In 2007, enterprise open source buyers will recognize the need for that kind of holistic architecture. How they get it is another matter. Few have the in-house expertise to manage and integrate legacy systems and open source stacks to achieve it. Even fewer open source software providers have the enterprise expertise to help them. Increasingly, enterprise customers will turn to systems integrators (SI) who can give them the blueprint to create and manage an infrastructure aligned with their business strategy that integrates appropriate open source elements and optimizes their performance.

2. Specialized Stacks Will Drive a New Direction for Business Applications

The LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stack, focused on general functions such as operating environment and database services, has until now formed the foundation for most open source projects.

The status quo is about to change dramatically. “In 2007, we’ll see a rise in more differentiated open source stacks for specific purposes, such as business intelligence, content management and output management,” says Ali Shadman, vice president and general manager, Open Source Solutions, Systems & Technology, Unisys. “Each specialized stack will constitute a ‘black box’ – a plug-and-play; minimally configurable building block designed to fit naturally in modern data center environments and accomplish a single job from the outset. Such solutions are essential to ease IT management’s concerns about having to focus on integration of open source components instead of developing and managing innovative systems to support growth of their businesses,” says Shadman.

A key development in specialized stacks in 2007 will be the start of convergence for business intelligence (BI). “Traditionally, content management has been divorced from BI and focused mainly on managing files,” says Shadman. “Now we see the two converging in the semantic web.” The semantic web provides a way to gain a holistic view across an entire information set, including both dynamic and static information (e.g., PDFs). It enables more sophisticated data analysis across the business.