I must have touched a nerve with my last post, as I was contacted by two vendors that wanted to share their perspective on private cloud computing. Even though I don’t consider myself an analyst and therefore typically avoid “briefings,” I thought it would be interesting to see what they had to say.

Both vendors covered what I consider well-trod ground: Organizations use private clouds for reasons of security/compliance, data sovereignty, data gravity (i.e., there is lots of data on-premises and it would be very difficult to migrate it to a public cloud provider), application inflexibility, and so on.

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I’ve long been a believer in open source for the enterprise (indeed, my first book was called Succeeding with Open Source and was targeted at an enterprise audience). When I first encountered open source and grasped its characteristics, I was struck by an epiphany: once this was available, who was going to stick with the old way of doing things?

And enterprises gradually made the shift that I expected – swapping out Sun Unix for some flavor of Linux, building new applications on MySQL rather than Oracle, and adopting one of the burgeoning number of dynamic languages like PHP or Python. 

For the first few years, open source adoption followed a predictable path: replacement of legacy vendors in well-established product categories due to price advantage. Many organizations also adopted open source because its distribution method (immediate download rather than after a lengthy sales process) made for greater application agility. 

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Over the past month, IDC and Forrester Research, two of the largest and most venerable analyst firms, have released 2016 predictions – and many readers will find their reports disquieting indeed (unfortunately, neither IDC’s FutureScape 2016 or Forrester’s Predictions 2016: The Cloud Accelerates are freely available to the general public). 

I believe that we’re in the beginning stages of an IT landscape transformation and, from these reports, it appears these firms share this belief. Moreover, they contain predictions that should frighten most vendors. Simply stated, this landscape transformation is bringing a new set of dominant vendors to the fore to the disadvantage of legacy players. According to IDC and Forrester, the next five years will bring immense change and disruption to the IT industry. I see this every day, but my sense is most people in the industry fail to grasp just how quickly things are changing. 

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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

The model of the future is based on social, mobile, cloud and big data, and IT is realizing that to succeed it must have the right processes, tools and culture. This is where open source is a major benefit.

Once you’ve decided to make open source a key feature of your enterprise IT infrastructure, here are steps you should take:

* Identify critical dependencies: It’s important to determine which components of an open source deployment represent critical dependencies. These are the ones you need to be fully certain about in terms of community size, robustness, feature suggestions and more. When it comes to components that represent dependencies, it’s important to ensure you don’t get locked into something that isn’t the perfect fit.

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