Open source is becoming much more mainstream now than a few years ago. It has moved beyond it’s pure dev tools and infrastructure heritage of Linux, GNU and Apache. It now has offerings in many of the traditional enterprise application spaces and productivity tools. These include CRM, ERP, eCommerce, BPM, ECM, ESB and BI.
The dramatic growth in the available open source solutions doesn’t mean however that all are suitable for deployment within an enterprise environment. The following are the areas you should consider when determining if there is a good open source solution that is proven, mature and enterprise grade.
- Maturity of solution (ie beyond v1.0, number of years in market, references)
- Existence of a commercial backing for the solution which provides support and QA of releases
- Number and reach of partners (ie SI’s, training, support, global presence)
- Size and activity of the community
- Adoption and usage by large enterprises
There are a number of useful resources available that can help in selecting a mature, proven, enterprise open source solution :
So perhaps this is in the wrong order or perhaps the following question is being asked less often. So the above discusses how you go about selecting an enterprise open source solution but why should an open source solution be considered as part of an enterprise architecture ?
Key reasons for considering an open source solution for the enterprise:
- Saving in license and maintenance costs over equivalent proprietary (closed source) solutions
- Better alignment to business needs – less bloat, just the features you need and none of the ones you don’t
- Open standards compliance. Important for both interoperability with existing ecosystem and availability of resources with those skills
- Ability to truly influence roadmap and give back to the community at large
- Access to source code provides greater ability to debug and enhance solutions
- Easy access to wealth of community experience and enhancements available
- Try before you buy – download the community edition and try using it, get instant feedback from users before commitment made to proceed
In conclusion open source or proprietary is not an either/or situation – a balance of both is necessary to meet the needs of an enterprise. With the growing acceptance and usage of open source solutions within the largest enterprises in the world, open source is being considered on equal footing to proprietary applications in several domains and decisions made are based on proven references at the right scale and fit to the business requirements.
Tagged: open source, Optaros 
