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Migrating to Open Source

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PCQ Bureau
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Economic uncertainties are posing lots of challenges for small and mid-sized organizations in deciding their business priorities this year. According to a survey we conducted recently to understand the business and tech priorities of Indian SMEs in the coming year, productivity improvement and reduction of operational costs were the top two business priorities.

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Open source software can play a key role to help you fulfill both these priorities. Let's start with reducing operational cost. One of the most compelling reasons for SMEs to migrate to open source is cost. The fact that you don't have to pay anybody anything to download and try out an open source software, makes it a compelling proposition. This doesn't of course mean that the software is entirely free. It simply gives you sufficient time to play around with it for as long as you'd like and when you're ready, you can hire a consultant, or buy support for it and roll out the implementation.



Productivity improvement is one of the key objectives for deploying any software, but whether it actually happens or not depends upon several key reasons, like whether the software is easy to use, whether employees have been sufficiently trained to use it, etc. Open source software can again play a key role here in terms of allowing customization of the software to fit the exact needs of the users. There are many examples where organizations have shifted from commercial software because they weren't even using half of the features provided by the same, but paying for them nonetheless. Shifting to open source allowed them to not only reduce cost, but also reduce the clutter of extra features that weren't really being used. So you might want to check how much are you currently paying for the existing software in your organization? Are you really using all its features, or 50% of them are unutilized? And then check if there an open source software available that can easily handle the feature you're currently using?



There are many other areas where open source software can prove to be a boon for SMEs, such as media streaming, bandwidth management, security, helpdesk management, network management, etc.



We've talked about some of those in this story. Plus, we even spoke to a couple of SMEs to understand how they're using and benefiting from open source software.

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