Open source and open standards: the new economics of IT

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 12 February 2009 08:36

IT Industry - Market

Is open source part of the answer to the financial crisis? Ingres thinks so.

So you've been told to spend less on IT. There are basically two buckets you can dip into: ongoing operations and innovation.

If your reaction is to reduce headcount, there are two main problems. If the cuts are on the operations side, how are you going to continue to meet existing service level agreements? And can you lose staff without losing essential skills?

If the staffing reductions affect new projects, the business need that sparked them is unlikely to have gone away. And in any case, innovation will probably be the reason why some enterprises emerge in good shape from the current mess.

So Steve Shine, executive vice president of worldwide sales and services at Ingres, suggests you take a look at your software licensing costs.

Ingres costs around one-tenth as much as Oracle over three years, he says, and because Ingres counts CPUs rather than cores when calculating ongoing charges, that could fall to as little as one-twentieth.

Even if you get an introductory discount from a proprietary vendor, you are likely to face increases when you install new hardware with multicore processors, when you merge with or acquire another company, or when the initial licence expires and you're moved onto list prices.

How to regain the negotiating advantage - see page 2.