Open Source – a boon during recession?

By Opennet Software

CIOs will have a lot less to spend in 2009. A CIO Survey conducted late last year showed that approximately 60% of those surveyed were re-evaluating budgets, re-negotiating contracts and putting those projects deemed non essential on hold. Data on the Middle East is much harder to come by but there is a general consensus that spending is down here too.

In the Middle East & Africa (MEA) region, businesses that have previously not considered this as an option, are now seriously considering putting their mission critical systems (from databases to application and portal servers) on software like Red Hat and JBoss SOA. New technologies like virtualisation are helping customers further consolidate and leverage the power of Open source on Linux and Windows.

As a subscription based system, open source players like Red Hat have to deliver on all their promises and value. Only by consistently delivering value will clients renew with Red Hat and they do. Open source has been growing exponentially around the world and now with all the major hardware and software vendors like the IBMs and Oracles of this world embracing the Linux platform the demand has increased substantially. According to IDC (2007), worldwide revenue from stand alone open source software is projected to reach $5.8 billion by 2011.

The most obvious area of Open Source to look at is at the operating system level. If a company was looking at a database or ERP system from one of the proprietary vendors like SAP or Oracle they may well have been planning on a proprietary hardware solution running a variant of UNIX. By replacing the platform with an Intel or AMD system and replacing the OS with Red Hat Linux, there are immediate cost benefits. Moving to Linux is also an easy alternative for existing UNIX skilled technical staff. Additionally, it allows the CIO to expand systems incrementally rather than having to factor in capacity in their hardware purchase from the start, further reducing initial investment and allowing him to use it elsewhere.

While traditionally Open Source Software might have been looked upon with some suspicion by corporate decision makers, today there are around 500 commercially supported Open Source projects. In the database area, there are products in use in corporate production environments such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and Ingres. There is also Zenoss for System Management, Digium/Asterik in Telephony; Jaspersoft in Business Intelligence, SugarCRM and Compiere for ERP and CRM applications.

If an enterprise is looking at a major in-house development project, options such as Red Hat's JBOSS (an Open Source alternative to Websphere and Web Logic) could be considered. All can offer significant cost savings over their proprietary counterparts.

With virtualization being a current industry buzzword, Open Source proponents like Red Hat offer a much more cost effective option in this area by including virtualisation in its base operating system at no extra charge. With the acquisition of Qumranet, Red Hat will soon allow the CIO to virtualise desktops. Where an enterprise may previously have been planning to purchase a virtualisation offering from VMware, using Red Hat can make significant cost saving possible.

Now move to the next step - technical support. Clearly quality and availability of support is of major concern to corporate decision makers. Commercially strong Open Source proponents like Red Hat has its own support centres positioned strategically around the world either directly or with partners providing the on-site support that is required in each area.  Red Hat support in the Middle East is provided by its regional distributor, Opennet, who operate its Red Hat Middle East Support Centre here in Dubai. The distributor also operates its authorised Middle East training centre in Dubai where customers can have their staff trained to RHCE or RHCT level by fully accredited Red Hat instructors thus becoming more self sufficient.

Acquiring skills in open source is not difficult especially for UNIX users. For example, it takes 4 days for a seasoned UNIX administrator to become a RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) and 2-3 weeks of instructor led classes for a Windows Administrator to acquire the same qualification. With the advent of Internet, online courses have helped to propagate certification and training. Leading universities in the US like MIT offer Open Courseware that is used by over 300 world class universities, with over 2000 online courses and gets in excess of a million hits a day.

As one of the largest proponents of open source and training, Red Hat has an academy program that has two variants - Open Source University & Red Hat Academy providing universities across the world the opportunity to tap into the Red Hat resource for providing open source certification programs to all. This has already been successful in large universities everywhere else in the world like University of Wisconsin that has contributed to help create the world's fastest messaging service engine under AMQP.org (Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol) which is now an industry standard for messaging between applications and competes with many proprietary offerings. In the MEA region too, several universities are eager to get in to the Red Hat Academy Program.

It's a chicken or egg situation. If you want to maximise ROI while adopting new technologies, open source offers the best alternatives but you need to invest in skills whether these are in-house or outsourced. If you want to forgo the investment in skills, in today's economic scenario, you may need to eschew some of the new technologies in the interests of short term survival or spend money on monolithic technologies that won't necessarily yield the quickest ROI.

For the savvy CIO, this choice is relatively simple. In today's economic situation they have a viable, cost effective alternative in the open source model with a relatively smaller investment in a resource that should yield immediate ROI bonuses for the enterprise. Easy to deploy and use, accountable services given the subscription model versus licenses and fast implementation given the agility and reliability of software.

Investing in Open Source now need not be viewed as a stop gap until times get better. The Open Source model guarantees the smart CIO a constantly improving and innovating product development cycle where the movement at large embraces new technologies as they become available.

In short, open source ticks all the boxes.

To learn more about the Open Source alternative for your enterprise in the first instance please email: david@opennet.ae. At Opennet MEA, we have a lot of experience in all areas of Open Source technologies especially in the Middle East & North African region and can have an open discussion on how best to help you take your first steps in its adoption.

Contact details:
David Allinson, General Manager
T:+971 4 3910686, E: david@opennet.ae