How is the retail industry using enterprise open source?

Been doing a lot of online shopping lately? There’s a good chance enterprise open source is helping to power your favorite retailer’s website, based on findings we published in The State of Enterprise Open Source report earlier this year. 

We conducted interviews with 1,250 IT leaders worldwide to get a picture of how, where and why they use enterprise open source. They did not know the survey was sponsored by Red Hat and were not necessarily Red Hat customers. 

The retail industry is investing in containers and Kubernetes

Our survey responses represent 13 different countries and various industries including retail, healthcare, telecommunications, and more. An overwhelming majority of respondents across these industries indicated that they’re choosing open source. 

Retail IT leaders cited better security (36%) as one of the top three reasons why they’re choosing enterprise open source. Furthermore, 85% say that enterprise open source is a key part of their security strategy. Access to the latest innovations (36%) and access to enterprise-level support (30%) were other top reasons. 

The future of retail and enterprise open source

How are they using open source in their environment? Today the industry’s common use cases for enterprise open source are in application integration, digital transformation and application development.

Looking to the future, 75% of retail respondents anticipate the use of enterprise open source for emerging technology (like edge computing and artificial intelligence/machine learning) to grow in the next two years. This could make things like mobile checkouts or curbside pickup even more convenient for you.

Get a quick overview of these findings and more results in The State of Enterprise Open Source: Retail infographic.