The first and second open source migration waves were periods of rapid expansion for companies that rose up to provide commercial assurances for Linux and the open source databases, like Red Hat, MongoDB, and Cloudera. Or platforms that made it easier to host open source workloads in a reliable, consistent, and flexible manner via the cloud, like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

This trend will continue in the third wave of open source migration, as organizations interested in reducing cost without sacrificing development speed will look to migrate more of their applications to open source. They’ll need a new breed of vendor—akin to Red Hat or AWS—to provide the commercial assurances they need to do it safely.