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Offerings Are Maturing
The growing presence of open source software in the information system illustrates the greater maturity of the offerings. Some years ago, open source vendors were “preaching to the choir” by offering their solutions to users who already supported the open software movement. The contrast today, however, is that adopting organizations select open source solutions because of the competitive advantage they deliver.

Every day, new companies – including some of the largest in the world – announce their decision to develop a solution under an open source license. For government organizations that generally have stricter budgets and resources, cost and administration considerations have traditionally played a large role in IT decision making. Private businesses are not far behind. Recently, the International Oracle Users Group conducted a survey that shows that 37 percent of companies using an Oracle database are also using an open source database.

Today, open source is a solid alternative to the proprietary solutions, not just offered up by a few individual vendors. A Business Week article from October 2005 postulated about “the emergence of a real ecosystem whose ambition is to create software capable of competing tomorrow with Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP.” Since that article ran, venture capital firms have invested over $400 million in close to 50 open source companies. And the recent acquisitions in the space only prove further the relevance of the model.

Five Main Advantages of Open Source for Enterprise Solutions
With the success and growing adoption of open source clearly established, we turn our focus to the unmistakable advantages, which include quality, reliability, transparency, cost, and interoperability – as well as a few others.

Advantage #1: Quality and Reliability
A long-standing pillar of the open source community is the emphasis on reliability of the code and the ability of the community to constantly fine-tune the applications. While proprietary vendors seek ongoing customer loyalty, open source providers generally agree they seek customer satisfaction.

The business model of for-profit open source companies relies on revenue from service, consulting, and training – even in the cases where vendors have chosen the dual licensing model in order to offer both high value-added commercial solutions and free community versions. From a technical point of view, the community pushes the developers to provide high-level guidelines so that the readings and external contributions are done smoothly.

Product quality is in a sense “guaranteed” by the number of developers and the numerous tests run by the community. Meanwhile the initiating vendor continues to dedicate a host of resources to product development in order to realistically set the bar for features and performance. The vendors overall commitment provides the users with the certainty that the product is sustainable, the roadmap is consistent, and the bugs will be corrected. Quality is further guaranteed by the numerous exchanges between the company, the vendor, and the community via forums, blogs, or wikis.

Advantage #2: Transparency
Open source code provides open access to anyone. Not only does this make the customization easier, it also reinforces the companies’ independence toward the proprietary world. As outlined earlier, by publishing core code and the basic modules under open source licenses, vendors offer the developer community the opportunity to improve their products and make these improvements available to everybody. Given open access to the code, companies can easily and quickly adapt solutions to their needs, eliminating the necessity for expensive outsourced customization projects. Thanks to the community environment of editors, companies benefit from the integration jobs developed by other companies or individuals.

Advantage #3: Cost Savings
Numerous debates have highlighted the differences between open source and free software. Even in instances where open source software offers a free access license, it is not a clear indication that the project has no costs associated with it. As in any ROI or TCO analysis, the license cost is only one element of a whole: deployment, training, materials, integration should also be considered. Although the cost savings have attracted most companies to use these technologies, it is not the main argument in favor of open source. As we have just discussed, open source is also a choice of architecture, transparency, and reliability. However, if we look at the license cost of traditional proprietary offerings in the data integration field – a field that I know well – the final savings can reach tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars. This does not even take into account the complexity of these price systems (number of processors, number of different source and target systems), which maintain a voluntary vagueness, strengthening the feeling for the user of being chained.

See Next Page for Advantages #4 and #5

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