Open Source software growing in importance

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 01 October 2009 13:23

Business IT - Open Source

“There are also many instances of the OSS vendors collaborating to create awareness and generate demand. Examples are Alfresco and SugarCRM Ingres and Jaspersoft; as well as Red Hat and Ingres.

“Other perceived benefits of adopting Open Source, apart from the traditional cost savings, include no vendor lock-in, access to the source code, and the flexibility to further customize the software to match individual needs. All these in turn increase the ease of integration with the existing infrastructure of an organization, as well as the compatibility with different platforms. This gives the organization an opportunity to use and test Open Source without changing their whole IT infrastructure.”

Sawhney said that overall, apart from the large vendors like Red Hat, Sun, and EnterpriseDB that have direct presence in the region, “others rely heavily on their partners. Other sources like Web trainings, pilots, and proof of concept via phone are also widely used,” but, he added, “the lack of direct presence, localization, and support and services offerings continue to be key challenges to get the projects started and lower the common barriers of starting business overseas.”

According to Sawhney, one of the chief fears of end-user organisations is what he says is the “perceived lack of internal and external skills to support the shift towards adopting an Open Source strategy,” and that IDC finds that organisations would be more likely to subscribe to hardware or software support services in order to support Open Source software, followed closely by application management/outsourcing and training/education services.