Open source and open standards: the new economics of IT

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 12 February 2009 09:36

IT Industry - Market

The vendor knows you're locked in, and is therefore in a good position to take a hard line during ongoing contract negotiations.

But if you start transitioning selected applications to an open source, open standards database, the balance starts to shift.

Shine says Ingres was able to port a German bank's application from Sybase to Ingres in just four days.

"Open source on its own isn't going to do it," he warns, as there's still a risk of being locked in by non-standard linkages. For instance, if your proprietary application server talks to the same vendor's database in a non-standard way, it's not going to be an easy task to replace just one of the layers.

A similar situation showed up at that same bank: another application took eight weeks to port from MySQL to Ingres because it made use of MySQL-specific features.

The point is that it can be a quick and cheap process to transition applications that are already using open standards. It's just another example of picking the low-hanging fruit.

Once you've managed to get around 15 percent of your applications free of dependency on the main vendor, you'll have much more leverage during negotiations, suggests Shine. This reverses the disadvantage you suffered as a result of trying to simplify your IT environment by consolidating around a small number of vendors.

How quick is the ROI? See page 3.