Subscribe

Know your options

By Sean Bacher, ITWeb contributor.
Johannesburg, 01 Sept 2014

Praxis Computing, in partnership with RedHat, will be hosting the "Enterprise Open Source - Meet the Stack" conference at the beginning of October.

The idea of the conference is to educate businesses about alternative, open source business solutions that will help them stay competitive and at the same time save them money.

"Open source started out as something that only geeks used. However, over the years, there has been a shift - both locally and internationally - to open source solutions," says Lisa Herbert, Executive at Praxis Computing.

The shift can be attributed to many factors, but the two that stand out the most are cost savings and flexibility.

"Many businesses rely on known brands, and although there is nothing wrong with this, in many cases they are wasting thousands of rands that could be spent elsewhere," says Herbert.

For instance, when a company buys a propriety solution it has to buy a set of licences depending on the number of instances the program will be run. The business would then renew these licences every year or every few months, depending on the software vendors' contracts. So, if a company purchases 10 licences and few months down the road realises it only needs two instances of the program, it will continue paying for the other eight until the contract comes up for renewal.

Also, when a company buys propriety software, it is often locked into that vendor's various other solutions, meaning that if it had bought proprietary call centre management software, it would have to buy a customer relationship management solution from the same vendor in order for the two departments to be able to share information with each other.

This is not the case with open source. When a company buys an open source solution, it pays only for what it needs. Additional pieces of open source software can also be sourced from different vendors and because the company has access to the source code, these solutions can be programmed to communicate with each other.

Having access to the source code also means that solutions can be tailored to suit the individual needs of each company.

Many companies believe that once they go open source, all their current solutions become redundant. "This is not the case, as open source software can be built around a business's current infrastructure and software portfolio - in essence complementing what they have."

Where is the support?

Another reason many businesses went the more expensive, proprietary software route was because of support. When they bought a vendor-specific solution, service level agreements came into place that promised a certain amount of support each month.

In the past there were very few companies like Praxis Computing that were able to comfortably implement an open source solution and then offer the company the support it needed. Companies that went open source often had to get their own programmers to make sure the software was running and should the solution or application break, it was up to the programmers to troubleshoot the problem.

"South African companies, both in the private and government sector, are quickly seeing the benefits of open source," continues Herbert.

For instance, the State Information Technology Agency (Sita) recently commissioned Praxis Computing to implement a hybrid business intelligence solution within the information financial management system (IFMS) project. IFMS is a large enterprise resource planning (ERP) project that replaced the government's current cross-platform systems. "Our solution consisted of Pentaho's Enterprise BI solution, an open source portal from Liferay for collaboration between the various departments accessing data from Sita's Oracle10g proprietary database," she says.

From the above solution it is not only clear where enterprises are headed in terms of business solutions, but it also clearly shows how open source and proprietary software can co-exist.

"Open source has come a long way. There are thousands of companies with employees who have the knowledge and are able to build solutions based entirely on a company's unique needs. Businesses just need to be made aware of it and guided through the process, which is exactly what we hope to achieve with the Enterprise Open Source - Meet the Stack conference," concludes Herbert.

Can you afford not to meet the stack?

According to the Open source investment and adoptions report done by Raconteur, figures show that investments in open source projects have shot up 49% from 2010 to 2011 from $452.8 million to $674.9 million. Furthermore, in 2008, there were 1.2 million open source-related software jobs in the United States alone. That number is projected to increase to 1.47 million by 2018. These trends indicate that open source is here to stay and that companies of all sizes will start stacking up their options when investing in new software solutions.

Share

Editorial contacts

Sean Bacher
Praxis