Alfresco’s open source barometer study is poorly named

I must confess that I haven’t paid attention to the Alfresco open source barometer study in the past. However, the title of the press release “Alfresco’s Open Source Barometer Reveals that Enterprises Are Using a Mixed Microsoft, Java and AJAX Environment” caught my attention.

Reading the results, and more importantly, understanding the methodology, I’m disappointed that this study is billed as an “open source barometer.” In fact, it is a study of respondents interested in an open source ECM solution who have decided to evaluate/use Alfresco. To claim that the results from this very narrow set of respondents is representative of the broader open source user community is a stretch at best.

For instance, just because a respondent is going to deploy Alfresco on Tomcat on RHEL does not mean that Tomcat or RHEL are the key production environments at the company. Different departments, divisions, and sites can, and do, make different technology decisions. In fact, even within the same IT team, at the same location, different infrastructure is often used depending on the application being deployed.

In another example on chart 20 of 30, the report claims that 33 percent evaluate on Windows, while only 21 percent deploy on Windows. The figures are 53 percent and 64 percent for Linux. While this may be true for Alfresco evaluations/deployments, this is not the case for all open source. For instance, Windows represents much more than 21 percent of JBoss production deployments (as Microsoft and JBoss would tell you). And heck, Windows represents much less than 21 percent (that is, 0 percent) of production RHEL deployments!

Or the sub-heading on the press release: “Over 50% of Windows respondents use Java Architecture for Content Management.” This statement, while based on results from the study, isn’t completely accurate. It’s equivalent to Microsoft surveying SharePoint users and claiming: “Over 99% of Windows respondents use .Net Architecture for Content Management.”

Moral of the story: Understand the survey methodology before looking at the results.

This report is much more useful for Alfresco users and vendors considering partnering with Alfresco than it is for the broader open source or software community.

p.s.: I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.”