stepping stone AG is a member of CH Open and supports the Open Source Survey Switzerland. The survey is conducted by the Research Center for Digital Sustainability of the University of Berne and published together with the swissICT professional association.
163 CEOs, CIOs, CTOs and IT professionals participated in the survey. The Open Source Survey 2021 shows how open source software has become even more widespread and relevant in many areas despite the already high values in 2018. It is impressive that today, according to the latest survey, 97% of companies and authorities use open source solutions. The most important reason for this is open standards, because «interoperability by design» always applies to open source software.
Main highlights of the survey
- 75% of the survey participants use open source desktop applications and 30% publish their own source code.
- Open source is the norm for programming languages and databases.
- One of the biggest growth up to 44% from 24% in 2018 has come from open source identity and access management (IAM) platforms such as OpenLDAP or Keycloak.
- The biggest leap can be seen in open source databases: at 78% more than three quarters of the companies and public authorities surveyed use MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL and other SQL- and No-SQL-based open source data stores.
Security - Increase of open source software
The use of open source software has clearly increased in the security environment.
stepping stone AG has implemented an Information Security Management System (ISMS) and has been certified according to the following international standard since 1st of January 2020:
Continous integration (CI) with continous delivery (CD) or continous deployment (CD)
This year, for the first time, the use of CI/CD technologies such as GitLab, Jenkins, GoCD and Travis CI was surveyed. At 59%, these modern tools for efficient software development are already used by more than half of the companies and authorities surveyed.
stepping stone AG has been using GitLab for many years and has also noticed an increased demand in this area and has expanded its service offering accordingly. Especially CI/CD combination of GitLab, GitLab Runner and Kubernetes for automated deployments.
Kubernetes - Usage more than doubled
Container virtualisation allows numerous applications to coexist within a physical or virtual Linux server. The orchestration of automated provisioning, scaling and management of containers is becoming increasingly important. Kubernetes is mostly used here today. Its distribution has more than doubled in the last three years from 30% to 66%.
stepping stone AG has been providing Managed Kubernetes for some time now. The foundation for this service is the OpenStack based stoney cloud.
Video and chat communication with open source solutions - more than 50%
Also for the first time this year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, companies and authorities were asked about the current topic of open source video and chat communication. Although in everyday life people often communicate with Microsoft Team, Zoom or WhatsApp, more than half of the respondents (55%) nevertheless stated that they use open source technologies such as BigBlueButton, Jitsi, RocketChat, Signal, Threema or Mattermost.
stepping stone AG has been using Jitsi for some time and made good experience with it. For this reason we have added stoney meet to our range of services for secure and confidential conferences.
Complete survey results
Download the complete survey results: Open Source Survey Switzerland 2021 (PDF) (only German version available). The use of open source software at stepping stone AG is described on page 79.
Are you looking for an open source based solution for your company? Since 2004, stepping stone AG has been offering personal consulting and solutions in the areas of engineering and automation of IT services with a focus on open source-based solutions.
