Obsidian Systems, a local open source software vendor, has acquired a 25% stake in GuruHut, a software development enterprise solutions provider, for an undisclosed amount.
The companies believe the alliance will benefit the domestic open source software industry. In an interview with ITWeb, Muggie van Staden, MD of Obsidian Systems, said the merger is ideal for enterprise open source, as both companies complement the retail, supporting technology and consulting services across the Atlassian and Red Hat stack.
"Organisations now have access to additional resources and Java expertise along with all the services that Obsidian Systems has been providing for the past two decades," he said.
In October last year, the companies announced they would provide technical services on Atlassian tools and assist the domestic middleware market to extract maximum benefit from this infrastructure.
They say this has paved the way for an integrated solution for the local Red Hat JBoss middleware market, as well as additional skill sets.
Both companies already share information, expertise and knowledge, and management from each business emphasised there will be minimal change to operations as a result of this financial investment.
"Currently, the teams are working within their knowledge expertise onsite with clients and in shared offices in Johannesburg," Van Staden explained. "Business will continue as normal; however, the benefit for our clients is the ability to see a seamless service from solution architecture, retail, deployment and consulting."
According to Van Staden, open source has become a global movement, not only in the IT industry but across schools of thought.
"In open source software development, Linux would have been one of the first successful and rapid movements in IT, so much that its stability, as an operating system, has become so ubiquitous that it is not even a discussion topic in IT.
"The biggest challenge is education on the difference of enterprise open source and community open source from risk, POPI compliance and security."
With the merger of GuruHut and Obsidian, he believes organisations now have the available resources to guide them in the best suited technologies that provide all the prerequisites of good corporate governance for IT for key areas such as high availability, big data, collaboration, middleware, virtualisation and cloud solutions.
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