We’re witnessing a big shift in how software is consumed.

in Techcrunch.com

OAS is a customer-driven phenomenon

Open software has already rooted itself deep within today’s Fortune 500, with many contributing back to the projects they adopt. We’re not just talking stalwarts like Google and Facebook; big companies like Walmart, GE, Merck, Goldman Sachs — even the federal government — are fleeing the safety of established tech vendors for the promises of greater control and capability with open software. These are real customers with real budgets demanding a new model of software.

And the drumbeat is only getting louder. Each year we host 15 Fortune 500 CIOs as part of Accel’s Tech Council, and we continue to hear criticism about proprietary software (“expensive, slow to change”). Here are a few trends we identified that are driving customers toward this new model:

The Need for Speed and Control: The demand for innovation and rapid delivery means enterprises need agility from the software they adopt. Nothing is worse than waiting for a vendor to update a library when you’re trying to stick to your release schedule. Open platforms allow companies to move faster and integrate at a deeper level without fear of lock-in by removing the dependency on proprietary vendors. Enterprises are no longer beholden to a vendor’s product roadmap — they can innovate to their own requirements at any time.

Everything is Web Scale: Enterprises are delivering solutions to a global, ever-connected base of users. Consider banks that support tens of millions of end users logging into their banking apps and hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide. Traditional, proprietary vendors are unable to deal with this onslaught of data and user scale. Fortunate for them, many early web 2.0 leaders (Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Yahoo) dealt with these problems and more, contributing much of their learnings to the open community.

Developer Power and Network Effects: CIOs are empowering frontline developers to download and adopt the projects they need to drive innovation. Developers are looking to community-led technologies where they adopt, deploy and meaningfully participate. OAS extends beyond Moore’s Law by also benefiting from something akin to Metcalfe’s Law: its energy and rate of innovation grows exponentially with the developer networks around it. Open software can absorb learnings and requirements far faster than a proprietary vendor, while simultaneously hardening security and stability. Open software is in many respects, much safer. Hadoop and Docker are constantly stretched, pushed, molded and smoothed by their developer communities — they’re far more mature than their age would suggest.