Percona open source barometer: licences, prices & pandemic crisis 

Open source database company Percona has said that the pandemic has accelerated database workloads moving to the cloud, but – with this movement – companies are also finding that costs rise… and, further, they also find that licensing concerns can spiral.

Percona’s latest market analysis gas suggested that enterprises have a deep appreciation for the value of open source software with 100% of the information technology (IT) decision-makers they spoke to saying the below:

“Using open source provides benefits for [our] organisation,” said everybody, in a Vanson Bourne analysis.

Over the past disruptive 12 months, use of open source software was reported as increasing by 79% of respondents.

The analysis here was commissioned to understand the business perspective of open source software. Of the 200 respondents, 25% were from medium-size enterprises of 500-999 employees and 75% were from large enterprises with more than 1,000 employees. 

Large enterprise respondents were most likely to have moved databases and applications to cloud services. Just 15% of large enterprises continue to have all their databases and applications running at their on-premises datacenter, compared with 29% of medium-size enterprises.

The transition to the cloud was accelerated by the worldwide pandemic and demand for flexible, fast and reliable technology. However, it’s likely the increase in demand led to an increase in costs — 68% of respondents say that cloud infrastructure has become more expensive in the past year.

When asked about the benefits of using open source, 63% of respondents cited increased innovation, 58% cited improved security, while 50% said cost saving and 21% said avoiding vendor lock-in.