Companies should be software eclectic

By Paul Vecchiatto, ITWeb Cape Town correspondent

Cape Town, 12 Jul 2007

South African organisations should be eclectic in their software choices by looking at a mix of open source and proprietary solutions, rather than pinning their hopes exclusively on one or the other, consultancy SynerLogix says.

Thabied Harris, SynerLogix founder and CEO, says the cost of proprietary systems is often prohibitively high for many South African companies, even large ones.

"Although global vendors have split up their markets into offering solutions for the small and medium enterprise organisations, these are still large companies within the SA market and only a handful can afford the full solutions," he says.

Harris, who spent 16 years as a management expert at shipping group Safmarine, says a company should put in the best possible system, but at the same time, it should not put the company at risk.

"Often a proprietary system means not as many people can access it because of the cost. In the case of proprietary business intelligence (BI) systems, this then creates a few 'power-users', who hold a lot of that company's intellectual capital. If one of those power-users had to leave, the company could find itself at risk," he says.

While on a global scale propriety software vendors are not publicly keen on merging their system with an open source solution, on a local level they are inclined to tolerate it, Harris says.

"It is possible, for instance, to have an open source presentation layer on top of an Oracle database, or an Oracle front-end on top of an open source database such as MySQL."

Harris also points out that IBM has incorporated some open source functionality into its latest version of Lotus Notes, allowing for greater integration with other open source systems.

Another reason for companies to become more eclectic is government often follows private sector trends, and the more demand companies generate for open source trained graduates, the greater the skills base will be.

Proprietary software still has the advantage over open source in terms of the greater number of trained people available to implement the systems, and the greater sense of marketing savvy the vendors have, notes Harris. On the other hand, open source systems do have lower cost of ownership and more flexibility in implementation.