In my prevoius blog, , I had mentioned some of the misconceptions and misgivings regarding OpenSource and tried to address these concerns. In this blog, I will proceed to give a few examples of how OpenSource technologies have brought about paradigm shifts in the domain of Information Technology. Many of these paradigm shifts have touched the lives of millions directly and some indirectly.
There are multiple examples of the use of OpenSource in everyday life of many of us, which we take for granted - Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkdIn, Whatsapp to name just a few (I apologise to many of the other OpenSource based companies whom I have not mentioned - they are no less, but I needed to keep the list short). The Android Operating System is a Linux based Operating system. If we just think Social Media, no one in their right senses would be using anything other than OpenSource to develop their product.
Cloud provisioning is another area where OpenSource has seen rapid progress and despite there being proprietary solutions available, the OpenSource solutions are fast becoming popular.
High Performance Computing is dominated by Linux based OpenSource softwares.
Hadoop, Big Data Analytics are mostly on OpenSource.
All these may sound like high end stuff, which may not be what a medium sized business would be interested in. But these are proof enough that OpenSource is ubiquitous, and has dominated the thought process of growing business the world over.
So, why should a business adopt OpenSource ?
Here, I would like to give an example of a client of ours, who had started out as a 150 strong company and is currently having 500 odd employees and is growing. The client was looking to expand from the 150 odd people he had and wanted a solution which would simply scale, without the costs scaling proportionately. He was open to any solution, but needed the assurance that his business would not be hampered by the soultion. His business was highly IT dependent and could not afford downtimes. Security and confidentiality was also of prime importance.
We proposed a solution based on OpenSource Virtualization with a network architecture which would be flexible (user based dynamic VLAN), backed by OpenSource domain controller. Today, none of his users are bothered about how they are accessing the various components over the network because, they do not care - but the fact remains that everything at the backend is on OpenSource (except the Antivirus server). Whithin a year and a half, he has seamlessly scaled to 500 users, with almost nothing changing at the backend - except add some hardware. And the savings - as the numbers grew, the savings increased, since he did not have to pay for licensing costs. It is not only scalability that has improved - even his initial costs (barring hardware costs) had been reduced dramatically. All this could have been achieved with multiple proprietary products - but the Total Cost of Ownership would have gone through the roof - add to that, the license renewal costs of various softwares. However, at the client machine end, we did not propose any changes, since that would have involved retraining a large number of users - which he was not in a position to do at that point of time.
It is not as if we have achieved anything great - all this could have been achieved only because we had access to OpenSource based softwares and we merely put together the right components to get the required results. Every part of our solution was tested in our labs (some were even demonstrated to the client), before they were put in place. It is not as if we have not worked with proprietary technology - but that has been only when we did not see that the OpenSource equivalent had not matured enough to replace the same. But the belief that only a proprietary product can do something even when an equivalent OpenSource product exists is not always wise. The use case is very important since there are many features of a product that a Business may be paying for, but not use. The question then comes down to understanding the business requirements and creating a solution according to that.
For more on TIS Labs, please visit http://www.tislabs.in
There are multiple examples of the use of OpenSource in everyday life of many of us, which we take for granted - Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkdIn, Whatsapp to name just a few (I apologise to many of the other OpenSource based companies whom I have not mentioned - they are no less, but I needed to keep the list short). The Android Operating System is a Linux based Operating system. If we just think Social Media, no one in their right senses would be using anything other than OpenSource to develop their product.
Cloud provisioning is another area where OpenSource has seen rapid progress and despite there being proprietary solutions available, the OpenSource solutions are fast becoming popular.
High Performance Computing is dominated by Linux based OpenSource softwares.
Hadoop, Big Data Analytics are mostly on OpenSource.
All these may sound like high end stuff, which may not be what a medium sized business would be interested in. But these are proof enough that OpenSource is ubiquitous, and has dominated the thought process of growing business the world over.
So, why should a business adopt OpenSource ?
Here, I would like to give an example of a client of ours, who had started out as a 150 strong company and is currently having 500 odd employees and is growing. The client was looking to expand from the 150 odd people he had and wanted a solution which would simply scale, without the costs scaling proportionately. He was open to any solution, but needed the assurance that his business would not be hampered by the soultion. His business was highly IT dependent and could not afford downtimes. Security and confidentiality was also of prime importance.
We proposed a solution based on OpenSource Virtualization with a network architecture which would be flexible (user based dynamic VLAN), backed by OpenSource domain controller. Today, none of his users are bothered about how they are accessing the various components over the network because, they do not care - but the fact remains that everything at the backend is on OpenSource (except the Antivirus server). Whithin a year and a half, he has seamlessly scaled to 500 users, with almost nothing changing at the backend - except add some hardware. And the savings - as the numbers grew, the savings increased, since he did not have to pay for licensing costs. It is not only scalability that has improved - even his initial costs (barring hardware costs) had been reduced dramatically. All this could have been achieved with multiple proprietary products - but the Total Cost of Ownership would have gone through the roof - add to that, the license renewal costs of various softwares. However, at the client machine end, we did not propose any changes, since that would have involved retraining a large number of users - which he was not in a position to do at that point of time.
It is not as if we have achieved anything great - all this could have been achieved only because we had access to OpenSource based softwares and we merely put together the right components to get the required results. Every part of our solution was tested in our labs (some were even demonstrated to the client), before they were put in place. It is not as if we have not worked with proprietary technology - but that has been only when we did not see that the OpenSource equivalent had not matured enough to replace the same. But the belief that only a proprietary product can do something even when an equivalent OpenSource product exists is not always wise. The use case is very important since there are many features of a product that a Business may be paying for, but not use. The question then comes down to understanding the business requirements and creating a solution according to that.
For more on TIS Labs, please visit http://www.tislabs.in
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