Univa (www.univa.com), a data center automation company, has announced the findings of its "2013 Open Source Software Use" survey.

Conducted online by uSAMP, the report finds that Free and Open Source software (FOSS) is prominent with businesses today with 76% of companies using FOSS, while 75% have experienced a problem with using it. Businesses are relying heavily on unsupported Open Source solutions; therefore 64% say they would pay for supported software should it solve their problems.
 
A lack of enterprise-grade support is the largest problem FOSS users experience in their company with 27% of respondents raising this as their top concern. Other troublesome issues include usability (24%), maintenance (20%), crashes (19%), bugs (18%), downtime (16%), loss off productivity (16%) and interoperability (16%).
 
Indeed FOSS’ importance today means that 64% are willing to pay for better quality, with the following listed as reasons to do so: stability (25%); enterprise-grade support (22%); ease of use (20%); extra functionality (18%); bug reports/fixes (15%); integrated solution (13%); product upgrades (13%); and predictable lifecycles (13%). The demand for stability and enterprise-grade support suggests that the comfort of reliability and support is the number one factor that leads to invest beyond Open Source solutions.  
 
"We have always said that users are willing to pay for quality when it comes to Open Source software, and the results of the survey have confirmed as such" says Gary Tyreman, Univa CEO. "A large number of organizations use Open Source Grid Engine as a key ingredient in product development, but as the company grows they can’t afford to rely on unsupported Open Source Grid Engine. That is when they can turn to us for peace of mind, scalability and reliability provided by our team and proven Univa Grid Engine."

According to Univa, the key product development departments of a business where most mission-critical software resides -- engineering and R&D -- rely most heavily on FOSS (32%) trumping executive (5%), legal (1%), finance (6%), sales (8%), HR (3%) and marketing (6%) combined. Indeed one in 10 businesses using FOSS across the board in every department, indicating how heavily FOSS is relied upon as the backbone of a company.