Open Source Will Accelerate Cloud Adoption In India

Thanks to Android, open source has surely found its way into the hands of the consumer. On the enterprise front, open source has been playing a greater role - from the archaic virtualisation perspective to new age cloud technology. Peter Lees, Principle Technologist, SUSE, in conversation with Biztech2.com, explains how open source can be best utilised with other technologies in a cost-centric market like India.

In India, the proprietary vs. open source debate has been on for quite a while. What has changed in the recent times?

Over time companies have realised that open source is not only about being cost effective, but also about security and ease of management. Now the question has shifted from ‘Should we go ahead with Linux?’ to ‘Which Linux we should use?’ Interestingly, Indian CIOs seem to be more in favour of open source, and we see widespread adoption in the BFSI vertical.

What’s really driving the migration from proprietary to open source?

Over the last two to three years, one of the key factors driving the migration from traditional UNIX proprietary systems to Linux is that now we are into a kind of plateau stage when it comes to the processor speed.

These days the processors for commodity hardware using proprietary software and for the ones using open source are almost at the same speed bands. So, now there isn’t any raw speed advantage with the proprietary software. At the same time companies have seen better performance enhancement using open source on the same commodity hardware. Today when we are moving to cloud, open source makes all the more sense as the overall objective of cloud is to keep the budgets down.

How do cloud and open source get along together?

For large enterprises, the cost of setting up own private cloud with open source systems will be far less than deploying traditional proprietary software. From a security point of view, the kind of robustness that open source provides is unmatched with no issue of vendor lock-in. With these elements open source will definitely help cloud make deeper inroads into countries like India.

Companies tend to make monumental investments, especially in hardware, which becomes ‘legacy’ and redundant in a matter of two to three years. How can open source help companies leverage more out of their current investments and give their infrastructure a longer life?

Companies can look into those OS platforms that provide long term support for all their current applications. Take, for instance, a company running an ERP from SAP planning to go ahead with an OS upgrade. Now, if the OS is not compatible with the current SAP version the company will need to incur extra cost on a new version that is compatible. If the same company goes for an OS which will support the existing version of SAP they can then save on the cost of getting a new version, and can stretch the usage of the existing SAP version. In this regard, open source systems might play a major role as they can be modified and fine tuned according to the existing software/hardware infrastructure.