Zenoss announced the results of its 2010 Open Source Systems Management Survey today at LinuxCon 2010.

The survey was conducted on systems management from 2006-2009. IT professionals at the USENIX Large Installation Administration conference and members of the Zenoss open source systems management community were surveyed from 2006-2009. Nearly 1,000 people responded to the survey. The results were somewhat expected.

Of the 974 people surveyed, 955 use open source in enterprise and half of the people surveyed said they use the cloud in some capacity. Additionally, the number one reason people gave for not choosing open source was the lack of support, immediately followed by insufficient documentation. Tangentially, Quality of Support was the number one reason people surveyed selected the proprietary alternative.

The survey then broke down the differences in results between the Zenoss Community and USENIX LISA attendees. More Zenoss Community members were network operators than any other profession surveyed. While the majority of USENIX LISA attendees were either engineers or server operators.

The majority of USENIX LISA attendees manage between 50 and 100 devices. The majority of Zenoss Community members manage between 100 and 500.

While the majorities of both survey samples answered the question, “What effect has the economy had on your use of open source software?” as “None, we still use the same amount of open source as before,” Zenoss Community members showed a larger interest in exploring open source as an alternative to proprietary than USENIX LISA respondents.

Full results can be viewed at http://community.zenoss.org/