The case for open source has been building steadily over the last decade, and can offer a compelling argument for cutting IT costs, or lowering the barrier to entry into new areas of revenue generation. So, is it right for your business? The answer depends on a combination of feature set fit to your requirements, product maturity and support that will be unique to you.
A Saugatuck research survey showed that 50% of businesses plan to use open source for mission critical systems by 2012 (up from 20% currently). This represents the gradual maturity of open source from its traditional power base amongst Internet Web Servers (where Apache and Linux have enjoyed more than 50% of the market for the last 10 years), into the heart of corporate data centres.
During this time open source has moved progressively from infrastructure and databases into the core business areas of eCommerce, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). For businesses, this has presented the opportunity to move from reaping benefits in the form of reduced costs, to leveraging open source to drive growth across the organisation.
Figure 1: Open Source Maturity
The benefits – and the costs
Open source is broadly divided into innovation, targeted at developers and early adopters, and commercial, targeted at mainstream business. If your organisation is looking at venturing into a new area of business at the (b)leading edge, then you may well be attracted by innovative new software offerings. This argument becomes even more compelling if you have the development expertise to extend and support the product.
If you’re looking at running core services on open source, or developing a service that is strategic to your business, your requirements may be better served by commercial open source. Much of the widespread acceptance of open source at enterprise level has been driven by the availability of commercial support. This offers a number of benefits: Support and consultancy during product selection and implementation, development resources to extend the solution or integrate with other products, as well as defined Service Level Agreements. Red Hat pioneered commercial open source with Red Hat Linux, and support is now available for the vast majority of mainstream open source offerings.
Figure 2: Benefits and Cost of the open source model
Next steps
So, if it hasn’t already, your business should be gearing up to embrace this brave new world, right? Well, certainly evaluating. Look no further than the changes that such industry heavy weights as IBM and Oracle have undergone to gauge the momentum of open source. Both have embraced open source, both for use in their own product offerings, and by contributing code back to the community. Key to this is their recognition that the real value add is less about the software product than it is the service element – designing a solution that works for the organisation, and integrates into the existing IT landscape. Sun’s recent purchase of database vendor MySQL positions them firmly in the same services / systems integration frame.
Many of the largest companies in the world are now running open source in their data centres, and most of those that aren’t expect to do so within a 2 to 5 year timeframe. If your commercial software vendor is providing the support and feature set that your business needs cost-effectively, there is unlikely to be a business case for change. In this case consider open source for new developments outside of your existing vendors’ areas of strength. If you’re not as convinced by the support and feature set that you’re currently building on, open source merits serious consideration.
