the last decade, it has gradually attracted investments and commitment of resources from major businesses and vendors to improve its quality, security and scalability. Google, VMware, Cisco, Intel (to name just a few among thousands) have been investing in OSS development. Traditional IT vendors such as Oracle, Microsoft and SAP are going to great lengths to ensure their products work on OSS platforms. Most people don’t realize that the vast bulk of SAP products today incorporate large numbers of open source components and that Microsoft is one of the most active contributors to open source. In fact, I am aware of only two publicly traded organizations that that have established a wholly owned subsidiary dedicated to “open” technologies and open source – Microsoft and Qualcomm.
Among the lingering barriers to OSS adoption is the misperception that there is an immediate ROI to enterprise open source adoption. This is rarely the case. When you include transition and migration costs, training, support, governance, etc., ROI can be negative. However, the traditional grounds up nature of open source adoption will typically have a positive ROI at the department level until it reaches a certain saturation

point -relatively unique to each corporation - where open source becomes an institutionally recognized core component of the IT landscape and all sorts of corporate controls are applied. Although, the more open source an organization consumes and the longer it does so, the better the financials become. And when considered on the basis of TCO, the results are generally quite positive. License and subscription costs are typically an order of magnitude less than comparable proprietary solutions, there are frequently more support options, and the OSS licensing regime ensures availability and continuity. Where both TCO and ROI tend to be positive is when OSS is used to innovate around new technologies such as big data, analytics and cloud computing. There are far fewer legacy systems that require replacement, migration or re-architecting.

Once an enterprise gets its OSS adoption underway, it faces an important reality: the flexibility that OSS provides can be a double-edged sword. The number of choices available to create an IT stack or end-to-end solution can be daunting and can easily lead to indecision or confusion. Enterprises must carefully deliberate upon which solutions to adopt, considering such factors as open source license, community maturity and vitality, and commercial ecosystem.

Many enterprises today are deeply engaged in OSS projects. Their participation is driven by the ability to have an impact on how an open source project evolves, so that their developers can become more efficient. This also gives organizations visibility and access to highly skilled developers.

Inner Source

Open source development principals (collaboration, meritocracy, transparency) are being leveraged within organizations to address critical issues including technology redundancy, disparate, inefficient and hierarchical development models and lack of innovation and knowledge drain. OSS is ushering in a new way for enterprises to develop software, known as Inner Source, which can effectively improve developer productivity, code quality and security and dramatically increase reuse.

A leading indicator, that OSS is becoming a disruptive force in IT is the fact that vendors are snapping up commercial open source enterprises at heady valuations including Red Hat’s acquisition of open-source storage firm Inktank last year, HP acquiring OSS cloud provider Eucalyptus, Tibco snapping up open source BI pioneer Jaspersoft, and Microsoft’s announcement that they will acquire Revolution Analytics, to name just a few. In short, there is a definite push traditional IT companies are making towards ensuring that their products become interoperable with OSS good news for enterprises.

Saying “Yes” to Open Source?

The question of when to begin using OSS is now largely rhetorical one, the more relevant question: When does open source move from a tactical component of our IT environment to a strategically imperative technology and development model? The answer to that is most likely now.

Open source’s strategic impact can be seen and felt in many industries. For example; in the financial services sector where it’s no longer the “cool” place to work, enterprises are aggressively engaging in open source communities to retain and recruiter developers. They are and they’re collaborating to reduce the burden of developing, maintaining, and paying for non-differentiating software. In the retail industry, where it is imperative that customer facing solutions are brought to market faster and more usable information is acquired, companies are building sophisticated commerce and analytics platforms based on Hadoop and customer facing systems on Drupal. Today, regardless of your challenges or the opportunities in front of you, there is a compelling case for the strategic use of open source software.

So, I am glad to have been wrong about open source and to know that I will have plenty to do for some time to come.