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Adecade ago, people dismissed open source (OS) as a flash in the
pan-something that was meant for geeks and students dabbling with some new
software without wanting to pay for the licenses. Circa 2008, the situation has
changed. Today, OS solutions feature prominently in the IT shopping list of most
CIOs.
Don't take our word for it. IDC predicts that the growth opportunity for the
Linux ecosystem, including hardware, packaged software and services aboard the
Linux operating system will grow from a $15 billion opportunity in 2005 to over
$40 billion in 2010.
Even Gartner stated that in a few years' time, almost all businesses would
use OS. By 2012, more than 90 percent of enterprises will use OS in direct or
embedded forms, predicts a Gartner report-The State of Open Source 2008-which
sees a 'stealth' impact for the technology in embedded form. Users who reject OS
for technical, legal or business reasons might find themselves unintentionally
using OS despite their own opposition.
Documentation for OS products is easily available with a vibrant online
community, besides the support network that vendors with OS products have put in
place. So there is no denying that OS will become a mainstay in the enterprise
network soon.
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Nandu
Pradhan President, Red Hat India |
There are several reasons for this optimism in the marketplace. One is the
increased awareness for OS solutions and applications that can be built around
it. Today IT managers are asking for OS and with the customers demanding for
it, SPs will have no option but to skill their team in offering these solutions.
Why it is looking up?
There was a time when the adoption for OS was low because only operating
systems were touted by vendors. But today the entire stack of OS products is
available, spanning operating system to middleware to developer toolkits to
web-based applications. Depending on which vertical a solution provider is
focusing on, the entire stack is available.
Besides this, the economics of using OS technology to build a custom solution
is obvious, because it's free. In short, this translates into more profit for
the solution provider because they can sell the product and service at a lower
cost, as their prices without high license fees are lower.
Often enterprises limit their software spending because they do not want to
buy more licenses than is crucially needed. With OS, this compromise is negated.
Besides this, if a customer opts for OS then he gets good scalability at no
transaction cost, which means more service revenues for the solution provider.
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Fact file |
- By 2011, Gartner predicts that at least 80
percent of all commercial software solutions will include substantive OS
- OS is being used equally for
mission-critical and non-mission critical applications
- Gartner's survey shows that 49.7 percent
of OS usage is being done for 'mission-critical' applications, as compared
to 59 percent for proprietary software and 58.5 percent for internal
development
Source: Gartner Open Source
Summit |
It is also heartening to see an increasing breed of SPs who are recruiting
manpower trained on OS or are proactively asking for training from the vendors.
Besides this, leading industry players like IBM, Intel, AMD and HP have made
provisions for OS applications to be integrated with their own product stack.
Partners too catch on
There was a time when OS vendors had to go out in the market talking about
their customer acquisitions and channel awareness programs to get more partners
to consider OS. Now I see a reverse trend where partners are getting in touch
with us, telling us that they are willing to give us a team of 10 people trained
on OS and ask us to help them identify key customer accounts that they can work
on.
Today, several training institutes are offering courses around OS, which
means there is a ready bank of manpower that SPs can employ. There is a very
strong developer network as well that has been working on creating newer
applications on the Linux platform.
What is also interesting is that SPs have realized that enterprise customers
want a network that is robust, scalable backed by a detailed service level
agreement (SLA). It does not matter to the customer whether proprietary or OS
solutions are deployed at the end of the day. So if the partner can give a
network that adheres to the SLA, using OS, then they can get better margins for
themselves as well.
There is no doubt that SPs can ignore OS at their own risk. At a time when
margin with proprietary software is shrinking, they can get bank on OS to keep
the registers ringing.
Vinita Bhatia
vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in Page(s) 1
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