New Study Highlights Growth of Open Source as Development and Deployment Model for Public Sector IT

Recently, we've partnered with the folks at Tech Target to survey a group of public sector IT decision makers to uncover some of the priorities and challenges they face with regard to developing and deploying applications, as well as steps they’re taking to meet their goals. Results from the survey indicate that these organizations are increasingly embracing open source solutions to meet their needs.

In correlation with this revealed affinity for open source, it was not surprising that Java was cited as the most popular development language, with three out of four respondents claiming it as their primary development framework. This insight reflects our own perspective on Java as a critical and popular programming language. Red Hat recently announced new leadership roles in the broader OpenJDK community, reinforcing its dedication to the language as a strategic choice for enterprise application development.

When asked how they perceive specific brands of middleware or Java technology, respondents ranked Apache Tomcat and Red Hat JBoss Middleware as "market leaders" above proprietary solutions. Looking at the challenges these respondents are facing, this shift toward open source makes sense to us. The benefits gained with regard to cost, flexibility and compatibility support the top challenges cited in the report:

• Integration: Public sector decision makers are keen to integrate and harness data from different sources throughout the organization, including applications, databases, services and devices.
• Iterative development: Public sector IT organizations are moving away from the waterfall method of application development in favor of more iterative approaches, such as agile software development methodologies.
• Process automation: Automation is rising as a strategy to enable more rapid and efficient application development; however, the majority of respondents indicated that they are attacking this challenge with custom, internally-developed approaches.

These findings reaffirm our work as we strive to fulfill our vision to make open government a reality. Many public sector entities are already using Red Hat solutions, such as virtualization and cloud computing, to successfully improve efficiencies and service delivery, meet the mission-critical IT challenges and allow for more agile and transparent operations by eliminating costly vendor lock-in. For more information, or to read the full survey report, please visit http://www.redhat.com/solutions/industry/government.