Driving digital transformation of your business is, of course, critical to extending your market value and customer experience gains in today’s market. However, building digital solutions that are viewed by your market as proprietary to you holds back their engagement. It can also hold back integrations with the digital services built by your partners and ecosystem members, as they see doing so will have limited ROI.

To overcome these concerns, the leading trend in this era is to base your digital transformations on open source software (OSS). This way, the baseline of your solution is viewed as a standard and easily accessible by the whole market. The appeal of this type of move expands significantly when the broader market can leverage the same OSS and contributes to its advancement. This is exactly the benefit market leaders, including Google, Microsoft, GE, Netflix, and many others (as shown below), are achieving — and, in doing so, are also dramatically expanding the appeal of working for them among the leading software engineers.

Source: “Open Source Contributor Index,” EPAM SolutionsHub, March 10, 2020 (https://solutionshub.epam.com/osci)

In my latest Forrester report, “The Benefits Of An Open Source Strategy,” we help CIOs craft a winning OSS leadership team and business case. We also help you gain its support across your C-suite peers and drive up customer and ecosystem engagement. And to learn more about the importance of this strategy shift, be sure to also read Christopher Condo’s latest report, “To Maximize OSS Value, Create An OSS Strategy.”