Open Source Puts The Enterprise Back In Charge

Roger Burkhardt, President & CEO, Ingres, in conversation with Biztech2.0, discusses the maturity of the enterprise OSS ecosystem and elaborates on how OSS puts organisations back in charge.

Is Open Source Software (OSS) mature enough to support enterprise applications?

Today you can get open source solutions that are truly enterprise ready and I would recommend strongly that CIOs and CTOs use OSS components that are ready for mission-critical applications. Even if companies plan to start out with a simple website, what often happens is that the simple website transforms into first a transaction hub and then becomes a self service hub. Thus I think that it’s a big mistake to start something with low expectations. I would council people to choose OSS software that actually is enterprise ready.

If I can speak from the domain that Ingres serves, we see organisations running major financial systems on Ingres software; we have seen governments move their customs and tax processing to Ingres, we’ve seen major financial institutions move their credit card processing to Ingres and thus we have a long legacy of running mission critical applications. We run production lines for cars and chips, we schedule airplanes for 110 different airlines around the world. We are very confident that we can provide enterprise grade capabilities as we have done it for many years. We are not alone in being enterprise-ready; there are many other OSS providers that have achieved the maturity to support enterprise class application use.

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How mature is the enterprise OSS ecosystem?

As a customer, what you really need is excellent support. Anyone can download free software, but enterprises need the assurance of support, in case they face problems. Apart from our experience of supporting mission critical applications at Ingres, I see large sophisticated System Integrators (SI), who are stepping up and providing support for companies doing large, mission-critical enterprise OSS deployments. Whether they are Indian or Western SIs, these are global players who’ve stepped forward to solve a problem and these include the larger technology companies like IBM and HP.

So the key thing that you look for as a customer is acquiring capable and sophisticated partners. I’m really confident that in today’s enterprise environment, these can be easily found. These partners, in turn, will act as advisors about which particular OSS technologies are appropriate for what particular use. Like anything else in life, you have to choose the right tool for the job.

Can you iterate some challenges that are unique to OSS?

One of the great benefits of OSS is how quickly it can be procured and put to work. An individual developer can choose a tool, download it and get started. That is the great strength of open source, but it also is something that as a CTO or CIO, you need to keep an eye on, because what you don’t want is every developer using different tools. It makes the environment very complex and makes skill management a challenge. Although it’s great to take advantage of the speed with which you can get hold of open source software, I actually believe that it makes the question of standards even more important. No CIO can afford to have five different open source applications running in your environment as keeping track of skills and managing systems becomes pretty tough.

What CIOs need to do is realise that OSS adds tremendous value and then pick one tool that meets your needs. Thus picking an OSS component that meets your needs and then building a set of skills around that component is really important.

In your experience, what are some of the hurdles preventing CIOs from adopting OSS?

I think that one of the biggest hurdles is an educational piece and involves getting familiar with the technology and the practices around OSS. Once you get beyond that and start looking at the technologies, you will realise how widely used OSS is, I think it becomes very straightforward to get benefits out of OSS.

Many of the things that CIOs have learnt over the years about managing technology still apply. It’s still important to have change management, standards and well trained staff. Thus all the things that we as CTOs, have worked on for many years, don’t go out of the window but you can just get better leverage out of those good practices.

What are some of the factors driving enterprise OSS adoption?

I think that one of the most tremendous things about OSS, apart from the cost reductions, is the control that you have over your environment. You have the flexibility to choose different offerings and combine them in ways that you, the customer, want. That allows organisations to be much quicker to market with new products and services and avoid getting “locked-in” to a particular vendor’s path. In other words, the key thing about OSS is that it puts the customer back in charge.

Can you outline some emerging OSS technology trends?

It will be interesting to see how OSS is moving to mainstream and enterprise scale applications. Many customers don’t realise that many of the products that they are using rely on OSS. Other customers are wholeheartedly adopting OSS with a view to use it for their mainstream applications. This is an interesting trend and India seems to be at the fore front of this, perhaps because of the tremendous skill base possessed by the Indian SIs.

Can you describe the evolving business model for enterprise OSS?

The classic open source business model has been one where the key intellectual property is available for no charge, under a GPL license, which allows customers to modify the software. This is very important because it puts the customer back in charge. It stops them from being “locked-in” to a particular vendor and being forced to upgrade periodically by vendors, when they don’t wish to upgrade.

Open source providers make their money by providing a very large range of services structured around the software itself, full indemnification for intellectual property, and consulting and system integration services to help customers maximize the use of their capabilities.

I think some open source companies have found it challenging to generate revenue from their technology. This brings us back to the question of enterprise readiness of OSS applications. When you have customers using OSS for enterprise scale applications, they are very willing to pay for support, in fact most customers demand support. If they are only using OSS as an application that is at the periphery and doesn’t matter too much, then sometimes there is not the same willingness to pay.

So I think an important part of the maturing of the open source industry, is this recent trend to run more and more mission critical applications on open source. As what we have found is that customers are not only willing to pay, but they demand to pay in return for support. No one wants to be running a production line on software and not have a support contract if they need help.

What are some of the benefits that OSS can bring to the start-up and SME?

Open source offers a tremendous advantage to the start-up. As a start-up, you don’t want to spend a lot of your precious capital on big, up front expenses till you know that you are going to see revenue. Thus using the open source model eliminates those up front licensing costs, which can be extremely onerous. It is also important as it allows start-ups to get to market quickly as the speed of innovation and development around open source allows this.

Open source is of great interest to the SME market. Many of these companies are looking for a highly cost effective solution that doesn’t require a large technical staff to run. What they are looking for are integrated solutions from providers that service the mid-market, which enable them to basically plug-n-play. They want a total solution for tools ranging from BI to transaction processing and they can get that without being beholden to a single provider. This is because open source companies collaborate well in creating integrated stacks for the SME market place.