We all know and keep saying that Open Source is here to stay and there are enough proof out there in the form of companies like facebook, google, linkedin and quite many who have their business enabled by Open Source software. I get what you are thinking, the short list above are those companies who are into social networking kind of business and we need to look at large businesses, like banks. While we can say that the adoption of Open Source software is increasing, the same in the mission critical enterprise software space is still not very visible. For example, big data and cloud computing has triggered the increased use of open source software in the form of hadoop, map-r, open stack and so on. However, with enterprise software vendors also pitching in with their way of addressing similar problems, big enterprises tend drift away from the open source.
What is holding the CIOs back in adopting Open Source in their enterprise software suite? Probably, they see a risk of continued support. In most cases, the CIOs are willing and ready to adopt or try Open Source software for the enterprise's secondary use and leave the mission critical software to be proprietary and fully supported. Java as the open source programming language is well embraced, but in the middleware space, though Apache Tomcat and JBoss share considerable usage, big enterprises still look at weblogic or websphere.
On the website front, Apache and NGINX lead the open source market share and has much wider adoption with enterprises of all sizes. However, with many proprietary content management frameworks emerging, large enterprises are drifting towards the same, so that the website content maintenance and collaboration could be fairly simple with these frameworks. In the mobile world, Android has come into stay and has wider adoption on the consumer side with Microsoft getting increased attention of the enterprises for the enterprise mobility needs.
Similarly, with big data, we see many open source NoSQL and SQL databases emerging and even gets much needed visibility. However, bigger enterprises tend to try these databases for their secondary usage like data warehouse, etc and leave their primary mission critical applications to use proprietary database solutions. When it comes to critical enterprise software, the decision makers go by real world case studies and their market presence and don't want to take risks in going with Open Source.
May be, if we take a closer look at the decision making processes, we can understand, on what grounds Open Source is left out. Typically, the following are the key criteria used for evaluating an Enterprise Software that come in the way of adopting Open Source Software:
Of all, the concern support and related cost seem to be the primary concern that hold CIOs back from adopting the Open Source software. The traditional methods of evaluating the software may have to be revisited though to overcome this problem. The decision makers want to play it safe.
Of late we see pressure on the CIOs to cut costs where possible and that is a good sign that Open Source Software is getting a fresh look, more so in the Government sector. Those doing business in and around IT are building the needed skills and talent in house and embrace open source solutions. We see this more in the areas of configuration management, build automation, automated testing and other tools which aid in building and maintaining systems and infrastructure. Open Source software is still not making inroads in mission critical enterprise business applications.
What is holding the CIOs back in adopting Open Source in their enterprise software suite? Probably, they see a risk of continued support. In most cases, the CIOs are willing and ready to adopt or try Open Source software for the enterprise's secondary use and leave the mission critical software to be proprietary and fully supported. Java as the open source programming language is well embraced, but in the middleware space, though Apache Tomcat and JBoss share considerable usage, big enterprises still look at weblogic or websphere.
On the website front, Apache and NGINX lead the open source market share and has much wider adoption with enterprises of all sizes. However, with many proprietary content management frameworks emerging, large enterprises are drifting towards the same, so that the website content maintenance and collaboration could be fairly simple with these frameworks. In the mobile world, Android has come into stay and has wider adoption on the consumer side with Microsoft getting increased attention of the enterprises for the enterprise mobility needs.
Similarly, with big data, we see many open source NoSQL and SQL databases emerging and even gets much needed visibility. However, bigger enterprises tend to try these databases for their secondary usage like data warehouse, etc and leave their primary mission critical applications to use proprietary database solutions. When it comes to critical enterprise software, the decision makers go by real world case studies and their market presence and don't want to take risks in going with Open Source.
May be, if we take a closer look at the decision making processes, we can understand, on what grounds Open Source is left out. Typically, the following are the key criteria used for evaluating an Enterprise Software that come in the way of adopting Open Source Software:
- Support: Looking at it positively, Open Source software gets support from developers across the globe, mostly with a well governed release process. On the other hand, these are not built with the needs of a specific enterprise in mind, but built for a specific purpose though.Thus considerable efforts would have to go in to make an Open Source software work for an enterprise and the skills are scarce. Those enterprise who have their business around IT have plenty of developers on board and will have the ability to customize and adopt and even contribute back. In case of non IT organizations, this will mean a dependency on a vendor who can offer the support at a cost. When the software is expected to be critical for the business needs then naturally, this concern gains importance leading to the decisions drifting in favor of Proprietary solutions. Another thinking is that, though the software comes free, the efforts involved in customizing, enhancing and maintaining it could result in a way higher total cost of ownership than that of proprietary software.
- Usability: Open Source developers focus on the technology and often ignore the usability aspects and thus resulting in increased costs around user training and maintenance. On the same lines, the end users are expected to use the software at their own risks and no own guarantees or warrants its performance levels.
- Concerns on IP: Being open source, the consumers are expected to contribute the changes if any they make to the software back for common use and thus the Intellectual Property of the enterprise might have to go back to the shared source code. In case of proprietary software, however, there could be an option to continue to own the specific IPs though at a higher cost.
- Reliability: Contrary to the reality, there is a thinking that in case of Open Source software, the reported issues might get too longer to get fixed or some might not be fixed at all. With community of developers all over the world contributing, Open Source software evolves pretty fast. However, no one could be held responsible though. Other related concerns could be that lack of better governance, absence of adoption by competitors and lack of support from big names.
- Security: As the source code is accessible for use by any one, there is a tendency to think that hackers can also get to know the software better and design attacks around the vulnerabilities. However, like in the case of fixing issues, some of the open source communities also consider fixing the reported vulnerabilities on priority and making the product secure. The security concern would remain even with proprietary software.
Of all, the concern support and related cost seem to be the primary concern that hold CIOs back from adopting the Open Source software. The traditional methods of evaluating the software may have to be revisited though to overcome this problem. The decision makers want to play it safe.
Of late we see pressure on the CIOs to cut costs where possible and that is a good sign that Open Source Software is getting a fresh look, more so in the Government sector. Those doing business in and around IT are building the needed skills and talent in house and embrace open source solutions. We see this more in the areas of configuration management, build automation, automated testing and other tools which aid in building and maintaining systems and infrastructure. Open Source software is still not making inroads in mission critical enterprise business applications.
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