Technology.am (Apr. 4, 2009) — Forrester Research suggests that we’re at the front end of a long cycle of open-source infrastructure and application adoption.

Forrester Research found that 45 percent of all companies using open-source software for mission-critical applications, the adoption seems to be slightly thin, leaving a great deal of room for even more adoption.

Huge swaths have adopted open-source infrastructure like the Linux operating system, JBoss application server, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. But the bigger and longer-term opportunity appears to be in open-source applications, which have only lightly been adopted, according to the survey.

Red Hat has built a $650 million business by selling support for Linux and JBoss, a business that continues to grow and thrive. This, however, is a tiny tip of an enormous $222 billion enterprise software iceberg, with enterprise applications making up a huge chunk of that iceberg.