The survey results reflect these expectations.

* Respondents felt most strongly about ease of use (59 percent) and performance (53.9 percent) as the most important aspects of an open source data integration solution.

* Licensing cost is not the gating criterion for enterprises turning to open source solutions. It actually comes fourth after performance, ease of use, and no vendor lock-in (42.5 percent), with only 42.1  percent respondents considering it very important.

* Access to the source code comes last on most priority lists when enterprises are choosing open source tools.

* 60.5  percent of respondents want a scheduling tool that lets them consolidate and centralise their technical processes.

* 57.8  percent of users need a dashboard to centrally monitor processes as they execute. Because enterprise users often work in teams and need to share data on large-scale projects, 54.9  percent consider a shared repository essential.

* Finally, 38.4  percent of enterprise users want an administration tool to centrally manage users and projects.