Research firm RT Insights has surveyed 253 IT decision makers to come up with a ranking of the top five open source software vendors for IoT application development.
Red Hat (76 percent) emerged as the clear leader followed by Google (68 percent), Microsoft (63 percent), Oracle (56 percent), and IBM (53 percent).
RT Insights said Red Hat’s leadership was due to its sole focus on open source tools. “While Red Hat is best known for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the company offers an extensive portfolio of tools for virtualisation, application platforms, middleware, messaging, mobility, storage, and system/application management. Red Hat also received more first-place votes than any other vendor, by a wide margin.”
It added: “Google’s strong commitment to open source is likely why it is ranked second. Google helped leverage open source to establish Google Cloud Platform. Google leadership in a variety of high-profile open source projects including Kubernetes, Apache Beam, TensorFlow, and Spinnaker have helped raise its visibility and image across the developer community.”
“Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM – while historically known for their proprietary tools – have all embraced open source software. Microsoft open-sourced .NET, and Azure has a strong open source slant with over 40 percent of virtual machines on Azure running Linux. Many Azure services are also integrated with OSS tools.”
RT Insights says that, to help ensure objectivity, it asked enterprises to rank order the top five vendors in open source tools for IoT development. “We rotated a list of 12 vendors and evaluated the results both on the basis of the greatest number of first-place votes as well as total mentions (total number of votes regardless of relative placement).
“We targeted IT decision-makers at large and very large enterprises in October and November of 2017. Our sample of 253 IT decision makers was split nearly evenly between senior managers in IT operations and application development. The enterprises that we surveyed spanned all major vertical industries other than those directly involved in providing IT services and support.”
RTInsights full report The Impact of Open Source Software on Developing IoT Solutionsis available for free download.
