Embracing Open Source and Free Software

What would be your reaction to the growing popularity of Open Source and free

software? Would you ignore it like another passing fad, or would you take it

seriously enough to at least take a quick glance at it? If the opinions of the

75+ different organizations we surveyed this time are anything to go by, then it

makes sense to do the latter.

We surveyed a cross section of CIOs from across the country to determine

their adoption plans and future strategies for using Open Source and free

software. This helped us gauge the general understanding and acceptability

levels of Open Source and free software across Indian enterprises. Needless to

say, the results were quite interesting, if you look at all the graphs.

For one, Open Source and free software needs no introduction in Indian

organizations. The ratio of organizations using it versus those who were not

using it stood at nearly 70:30. Further, Open Source based email solutions

topped the charts in current usage amongst the organizations we surveyed, as 43%

of them were already using it. Next in line were databases and Internet gateways

at 30 and 27%. Surprisingly, Linux on desktops seems to have gained momentum,

with 25% of the respondents already using it.

Future adoption of Open Source also looks very promising, with 72% of the

respondents saying they're actively considering deploying the same in the near

future. Interestingly, 44% of them said that they're planning to deploy Open

Source based network monitoring and management solutions in the near future. If

you're also one of them, then you should definitely try our network management

and security appliance, which we've given with PCQ Linux 2008. Even more

interesting was the fact that another 39% were planning to deploy Linux on

desktops. This is very interesting, considering that Linux at the desktop was

not a very popular choice in the recent past. Email solutions stood at third

place, followed by Internet gateway/proxy, firewall, database, and even unified

communication. The interest in deploying business specific Open Source solutions

like ERP/CRM, or collaboration, etc is still lower as compared to infrastructure

related tools.

If you're also planning to delve into Open Source software, then it's

important to understand the key benefits and challenges you're likely to face on

this path. Today, another advantage is that you can look at Open Source

solutions for more than basic infrastructure requirements. Many business

applications also exist in the Open Source world, but in order to consider

those, a number of things need to be kept in mind.

Betting your business critical apps to run on Open Source



Would you bet your business critical apps to run on Open Source as easily as

you would on closed source? This is a pertinent question to ask today, because

of the plethora of business critical applications available in the Open Source

world. For instance, we did a small search on sourceforge.net and found that

there were 600+ ERP and CRM projects each available for download. We say

projects because not all of them would be fully working ERP solutions. Many

would be at various stages of development. Likewise, there are projects for

business intelligence, data warehousing, workflow, project management, and much

more.

Given so much choice, and all of it freely downloadable, you'd think that

organizations would be falling over each other to try them all out. In our

survey however, the responses were mixed on the subject. Almost 60% of them said

that they would not bet their business critical apps to run on Open Source as

easily as they would on a closed source application. The primary reason that

emerged for the same-support. Most organizations were quite wary of the kind of

support that would be available for Open Source based apps. Security,

reliability, and interoperability were some of the other reasons for not using

Open Source for business critical apps.

Moving to the other side, there are quite a few organizations successfully

running Open Source based business critical apps. Forty percent of our

respondents said they were already on it. We saw examples ranging from an ERP

deployment or a CRM solution, to even online solutions to handle financial

transactions, all running on Open Source apps.

To make it all happen, a number of things are required. One of course is to

get committed support from a vendor, and that too over a long period of time.

Today, some of the leading and well known vendors offer support for Open Source

apps. The thing to check is whether the vendor would be able to offer the

support across all your office locations. Second of course is to ensure that you

get regular upgrades and updates for the software.

Lastly, irrespective of whether you choose an Open Source or a closed source

business application, you will have to pay for the support.

Understand the benefits



Before taking the plunge into any technology, it's important to weigh its

pros and cons. The biggest pro or benefit of Open Source software is the price

advantage you get from using it. Around 47% of the respondents to our survey

confirmed this. Indeed, lots of Open Source applications are freely

downloadable, so you do save some cost there. However, that's not the only cost

you incur over an application's lifecycle. You would need to pay somebody to

deploy and maintain it, which could be an implementation and support partner or

an in house team. You would need to study your existing setup and see how well

does it integrate. If you're already using a commercial ERP solution for

instance, and deploy an Open Source CRM package, then you would need to see how

well do they integrate. Otherwise, there will be administrative overheads such

as duplicate user names and databases. There would be other overheads like

patches and regular updates of the application. You might also occasionally

require some troubleshooting of the application, for which you would need to fix

an SLA with your support partner.

Incidentally, all these cost heads also need to be considered when deploying

a closed source, commercial application. So the bottom line is that you need to

compare both types of applications on all these grounds before taking a final

call.

Free access to the source code is another big benefit of Open Source

software. It also received the second highest response from our survey's

participants. This is indeed a true benefit of using an Open Source application,

but many organizations wouldn't worry about it too much. At the end of the day,

you're worried about having an application up and running quickly for your

business, and not about tweaking its source code, compiling and then using it.

Not every organization has the required resources to go down to that level. But

there are many who have access to such resources, be it a full-fledged

development team or a few internal champions. Some organizations have developed

complete information systems using Open Source software, while others have

tweaked existing products to interact with the modules of another program.

Know the key challenges



Surprisingly, though Open Source has been around for years, the biggest

challenge still faced by most CIOs continues to be difficulty in finding support

for it. Thirty five of the respondents to our survey confirmed this. In fact, on

a scale of 1 to 5 (see graph) for difficulty in finding support for Open Source,

the responses were skewed towards 3 and beyond. There are many sources of

support available for Open Source software, in which the web serves as the

biggest one, followed by having a support partner and an internal team. Speaking

of issues on support, Open Source is perhaps the only platform on which you

could reach out directly to the creator of the software for support. But then,

it seems that nothing beats having a support engineer come directly from the

company or a partner to resolve your queries.

The second biggest issue was interoperability with other platforms. This also

seems to be changing gradually because today, there are solutions available to

integrate different platforms together.The Fedora Directory Services for

instance, allows you to provide centralized authentication between multiple

applications. Likewise, in Windows, you'll find many tools to ease

interoperability. There are tools that allow you to run one platform's software

on another. We've covered many of them in our previous issues.

The other key challenges in Open Source world are confusion between what's

free and what's not, reliability, and difficulty in installing and configuring

Open Source software. Thankfully, most of this is being addressed by the Open

Source community. Take virtual appliances for instance. They ease installation

and configuration problems. Open Source licenses of course, are still very

confusing. We've given a broad overview of these licenses elsewhere in this

story.