Open source and open standards: the new economics of IT

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 12 February 2009 08:36

IT Industry - Market

Such projects should show a return within 12 months, making them a reasonable course of action for these troubled times. Shine reckons it should be possible to transition 60 to 70 percent of systems to open source and open standards over three years.

So why isn't everyone doing this? "Some people don't have enough pain," says Shine. Ingres takes a hard line with its sales efforts - if it has to explain and justify the commercial and technical benefits of open source, it just moves on to the next prospect.

But organisations that were previously "timid" about open source have opened the door and some are even approaching Ingres rather than vice versa. Things have "completely changed" over the last six months.

But is open source really ready for mission-critical use? Shine points to the fact that Irish tax returns and a fair proportion of Swiss inter-bank payments are processed on open source software. Both examples are about as mission-critical as you can get.

He also notes that some banks are using the free community edition of Ingres for less critical systems.

Organisations such as Red Hat have established the credibility of open source in terms of the operating system and application server layers, and now Ingres wants to do the same for high-end databases - and that's where most of the money is, Shine says.

And for those iTWire readers (you know who you are!) who think open source projects are nothing more than a knockoff of proprietary software, Ingres has a 35 year history. That's mature software.