Recession places OSS on board's agenda

Johannesburg, 15 Sept 2009

South Africa has been lagging behind the rest of the word in the adoption of open source software (OSS) because it has not been driven from the board level.

This is according to Louis Seyffert, country manager of Red Hat SA, who spoke at a Red Hat media breakfast held at the Westcliff hotel in Johannesburg last week.

However, the economic recession is fuelling the adoption of OSS in the country and seeing Linux placed on the executive board's agenda, added Seyffert. “The board is telling the IT department to cut costs and opting for OSS to do that.”

Analyst firm Gartner recently reported that 85% of businesses currently use open source software for mission-critical processes, with many more set to follow due to the dramatically lower total cost of ownership OSS offers.

Seyffert said that while Linux has been enterprise-ready for a few years now, there's still a big misconception, both at the corporate and government level, that OSS is a free product.

“Yes, you can use the free products, but the support is the value-add. It becomes a matter of risk versus cost. You can't, for example, run a bank off of free, unsupported systems.”

To this end, Red Hat clarified that it sells subscriptions and not licences. “A subscription buys you peace of mind because it gives you unlimited support,” noted Seyffert.

According to Red Hat, the development of skills remains a key challenge in adopting OSS in the country. The company's local arm revealed it will unveil the Red Hat Academy initiative later this year.

“The Red Hat Academy is aimed at the academic institutions in SA and will provide participating bodies with Red Hat training materials for their IT courses,” stated Seyffert. The company also bundles training with its subscription offerings.

OSS beyond the recession

Red Hat's focus going forward is developing virtualisation for the enterprise. “Red Hat is working towards making virtualisation a commodity with the ability to manage it,” said Seyffert. Solutions are being geared towards embedding virtualisation into the operating system. The company will also focus on its JBoss middleware offering.

Cloud computing is another a top priority for the company, with a focus on storage cloud solutions.

“Red Hat is focusing on computing on-demand. Any application, anywhere, anytime,” concluded Seyffert.