http://www.cutter.com/content/itjournal/fulltext/advisor/2008/itj081029.html
29 October 2008
Reducing Costs with Open Source
by Pini Cohen
In the current economic climate, IT organizations will have to cut costs just as other lines of business will. One potential alternative that IT organizations may consider are open source tools and applications. The open source alternative is especially valid when an organization is beginning a new project, but it is also a valid option when the IT organization wants to cut costs in an existing project or activity. The maintenance and support costs of software products is around 15% to 25% a year. In some cases, altering the proprietary software to an open source solution might cost (including integration) less than one year's maintenance expenses for a commercial solution.
Lately, I have seen many areas where open source software has reached an acceptable level of maturity and organizations are implementing open source software in production environments.
There are many factors involved in an IT organization's decision to adopt open source solutions, including cost, ability to extend the solution, licenses, support, and so on). Many of these issues have been discussed thoughtfully in many Cutter articles, including "Open Source Business Intelligence" by Brian J. Dooley, and "The Open Source Ecosystem: A Study in Fractal Complexity" by Tom Welsh.
One factor that is especially relevant in the current economic situation is that while the open source software can do a specific job rather well, in many cases, it does not provide a complete solution as the commercial products do. For example, in the application lifecycle management field, there are good open source tools that provide bug-tracking (e.g., Bugzilla), software change management (e.g., Subversion), and UML (e.g., StarUml). But these collections of tools do not provide a unified and related platform such as those offered by IBM\Rational or Borland. Another example is in the operations\monitoring area. There are rather good open source tools for monitoring (e.g., Nagius), service desk (e.g., Help Desk Lite), and CMDB (e.g., OneCMDB). But these collections of tools do not provide complete and unified platform like those offered by BMC, HP, IBM, or CA.
I believe that as the slowdown widens, IT organizations will consider open source solutions more, especially if the cost of labor changes reduces significantly and IT managers will fear less the internal work of integrating open source solutions inhouse (or outsource it).
Cloud\SaaS is another alternative that may be used to cut cost, but it is currently less mature and requires deep mental change within an organization. We can also expect to the combinations of these approaches: startups that provide Cloud\SaaS solutions that are based on open source.
I recommend that organizations consider open source solutions as one means for cost reduction; however, they should also consider that it is not easy to integrate open source solutions when they are part of a comprehensive process.
-- Pini Cohen
Reducing Costs with Open Source
by Pini Cohen
In the current economic climate, IT organizations will have to cut costs just as other lines of business will. One potential alternative that IT organizations may consider are open source tools and applications. The open source alternative is especially valid when an organization is beginning a new project, but it is also a valid option when the IT organization wants to cut costs in an existing project or activity. The maintenance and support costs of software products is around 15% to 25% a year. In some cases, altering the proprietary software to an open source solution might cost (including integration) less than one year's maintenance expenses for a commercial solution.
Lately, I have seen many areas where open source software has reached an acceptable level of maturity and organizations are implementing open source software in production environments.
There are many factors involved in an IT organization's decision to adopt open source solutions, including cost, ability to extend the solution, licenses, support, and so on). Many of these issues have been discussed thoughtfully in many Cutter articles, including "Open Source Business Intelligence" by Brian J. Dooley, and "The Open Source Ecosystem: A Study in Fractal Complexity" by Tom Welsh.
One factor that is especially relevant in the current economic situation is that while the open source software can do a specific job rather well, in many cases, it does not provide a complete solution as the commercial products do. For example, in the application lifecycle management field, there are good open source tools that provide bug-tracking (e.g., Bugzilla), software change management (e.g., Subversion), and UML (e.g., StarUml). But these collections of tools do not provide a unified and related platform such as those offered by IBM\Rational or Borland. Another example is in the operations\monitoring area. There are rather good open source tools for monitoring (e.g., Nagius), service desk (e.g., Help Desk Lite), and CMDB (e.g., OneCMDB). But these collections of tools do not provide complete and unified platform like those offered by BMC, HP, IBM, or CA.
I believe that as the slowdown widens, IT organizations will consider open source solutions more, especially if the cost of labor changes reduces significantly and IT managers will fear less the internal work of integrating open source solutions inhouse (or outsource it).
Cloud\SaaS is another alternative that may be used to cut cost, but it is currently less mature and requires deep mental change within an organization. We can also expect to the combinations of these approaches: startups that provide Cloud\SaaS solutions that are based on open source.
I recommend that organizations consider open source solutions as one means for cost reduction; however, they should also consider that it is not easy to integrate open source solutions when they are part of a comprehensive process.
-- Pini Cohen
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