With most of the enterprises successfully shifting their servers to open source, the current trend also involves critical software doing the same. “Business intelligence software and even customer-relationship management software is shifting to open source”, said Rahul De, the Hewlett-Packard chair professor in information and communication technology at IIM, Bangalore.

Even telecom firms are said to be evaluating the benefits for making a shift to open source. “Why can't CRM (customer relationship management) be done on open source? Why do you need a licensed platform to run it — some of the companies have started thinking about it”, said Anand Sankaran, senior Vice-President at Wipro Infotech.

According to Gartner research firm, Indian enterprise software market is expected to reach 3.92 billion (about 25,600 crore) this year and $6.7 billion (about 43,700 crore) by 2017. Expenditures related to business intelligence platforms, which includes open source versions is expected to rise above 13 percent to a total of $74.1 million (about 483 crore) in India this year and by 2016, it is expected to reach $107.4 million (about 701 crore).

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