More and more organisations are adding open source
technology to their IT procurement options, but the key question
has always been whether open source technologies are robust enough
for business.
The software may be technically good enough, but users have held
back because of concerns over the level of support they can
obtain.
Such concern is likely to become more important. Research by
Gartner suggests that 95% of the Forbes Global 2000 companies will
have formal open source acquisition and management strategies by
2008.
Key attractions are the financial advantages of the open source
free-licence model and its collaborative network for sharing
research and development costs by exploiting community-based
economies of scale.
Laurent Lachal, senior analyst at Ovum, said there were many
different types and levels of support that organisations should
consider before adding open source components to their IT
infrastructure.
“By definition, open source technology is open because of the
communities that share the development of open source projects,” he
said. “Some have very large, strong communities, like Apache,
Eclipse and Linux.
“The larger the community, the better the support – and by that
I mean support for developers. If it is not just an outright
development project, then there might be support for testing and
feedback support, including patches.”
But the free nature of open source technology, which makes it so
attractive from a cost-of-ownership point of view, is the same
reason Lachal warns enterprises against relying solely on its
communities for support.
“The feedback I generally get is that the level of support from
open source communities is very good,” he said. “But for an
enterprise – where you might need 24/7 support, and technical
issues solved on-the-fly within the hour, or else you start losing
customers and money – you need mission-critical levels of
support.”
Linux is the most widely used open source software, and
continues to be the most popular operating system at enterprise
level, according to recent research by IDC. Apache is the world’s
most popular web server.
IDC estimates that 70%-80% of organisations worldwide have
already deployed Linux within their IT infrastructure.
But open source is not just about Linux. “The open source market
is expanding from Linux into the database, middleware, application
servers, and applications for enterprise resource planning and
customer relationship management, for example,” said Lachal.
“A whole ecosystem is being built around open source products,
with strong, formal training, consulting, implementation and
support services.”
For example, in April open source, Java-based application server
company JBoss was acquired by open source supplier Red Hat. “JBoss
spent 18 months putting its own support infrastructure in place for
its customers, who will now work with Red Hat,” said Lachal.
As the range of Linux-based offerings has grown, dedicated open
source suppliers such as Red Hat and MySQL increasingly take the
lead in offering enterprise-scale support on a professional
basis.
Red Hat’s approach is through a subcription model, ranging from
maintenance updates and web resources, to 24-hour support and
response times based on service level agreements.
The tiered subscription pricing structure can be more economical
than traditional, commercial support and maintenance pricing
structures.
Werner Knoblich, vice-president for Red Hat in Europe, Middle
East and Africa, said that without the initial costs of creating
open source products, lower research and development costs were
passed on to the customer.
“The customers who are seeing the biggest return on their
investment tend to be those that migrate a classic Unix environment
to Linux, where they may have been running Sun Solaris, for
example. Some say they achieve as much as 40-50% in cost savings
[including support].”
Evidence of large-scale savings should go some way to reassuring
IT managers who are worried about offsetting the costs of
supporting an open source deployment alongside proprietary
component costs within mixed IT environments.
MySQL Network is a subscription service available in tiers –
basic, silver, gold and platinum – designed so that users of the
open source MySQL relational database can choose the appropriate
level of support for their requirements.
Bertrand Matthelié, EMEA marketing director of open source
database management supplier MySQL, said, “MySQL Network is priced
per server, so customers do not have to worry about the number of
CPUs or the number of cores, for example.”
The company has also entered into partnership agreements with
companies such as Novell, Hewlett-Packard and Unisys to deliver
MySQL Network front-line support to customers.
Such industry collaboration means users are offered a single
point of contact for the support of all their enterprise software
requirements, including any components that are based on open
source licensing.
Basic subscriptions to the latest open source server products,
for example, with CPU, chipset, memory and support restrictions,
will cost £187 per server per year direct from Red Hat and Novell’s
SuSE range, and £185 from MySQL.
Large, commercial IT companies like Sun and IBM also participate
heavily in open source projects and increasingly embed open source
code, tools and resources in their own product, support and
maintenance packages.
The growing involvement of commercial IT suppliers, major
service providers and systems integrators demonstrates the growth
of a professional knowledge-based network that is underpinning the
use of open source technology.
But annual costs for support from traditional IT industry
heavyweights that exploit open source alliances can run into
similar six-figure sums as proprietary support agreements.
Most suppliers contacted by Computer Weekly said project-based
or annual support was often negotiable on an enterprise scale,
depending on the services supplied and the mix of technologies in
the customer’s IT environment.
To be able to identify where to initiate incident resolution,
reasonable skill levels must be maintained within the IT
department. In other words, IT directors must effectively manage
service provider or supplier support relationships as well as the
IT systems themselves.
An area of recent growth in the open source market has been the
arrival of value-added resellers or managed service providers
selling business-ready open source systems to run in a live
production environment.
US provider SpikeSource, for example, offers pre-built open
source infrastructure packages with applications, libraries,
servers and tools already integrated, tested, configured and
bundled with support.
This investment model is proving particularly popular with
smaller organisations that may need more domain expertise, and
independent software suppliers who need to support a number of
programming languages at minimum cost.
Although nearly every IT supplier or services provider seems to
be developing some level of participation in this market, open
source companies that focus purely on software development are now
looking to develop their local channel businesses too, to fulfill
the local services and support needs of MySQL business users.
The percentage of total worldwide revenue last year from the
MySQL indirect channel, for example, was 30% – with a target to add
a further 10% in 2006.
However, some industry experts argue that despite the growing
maturity of open source support for business users, finding support
for open source IT systems need not be as major a consideration as
it is for commercial software options.
Cyndi Mitchell, UK operations director of software development
house ThoughtWorks, said this is because of the superior levels of
stability and performance generally expected from open source IT
systems.
Drawing on experience of bespoke, open source software
developments for large enterprises such as banks and retailers,
Mitchell said, “Many companies are using open source as a first
resort, depending on size and levels of IT sophistication.
“If you want to make a mission-critical investment, in many
cases the open source model is better geared to deliver higher
levels of support than proprietary, commercial software
offerings.”
Along with cost, there is also a question of independence and
the provider’s ability to handle all kinds of open source
queries.
Michael Azoff, senior analyst at the Butler Group, said taking
on a combination such as Red Hat’s professional service offerings,
in conjunction with those from traditional global services players,
is the best way to avoid conflict due to interoperability or cost
issues.
He also believes smaller open source providers have something to
add to the support mix. Azoff said companies like Red Hat were
beginning to challenge the bigger global services players, such as
EDS, Capgemini and IBM Global Services.
“The best support strategy would be to have two or three
providers, as people did in the days where you could only buy
licensed software, playing one off against the other to get the
best discount,” he said.
Case study: Irish Stock Exchange
The Irish Stock Exchange began migrating legacy systems to Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 18 months ago to obtain greater return on
investment from its IT systems, as well as reliability, security
and ease of maintenance.
Alan Finan, IT manager for the exchange, faced dealing with an
ageing Unix infrastructure running a mission-critical custom
trading application on an Oracle database that needed to be
simplified.
“We had to find a framework that would allow us to continue
doing business, whether from our current location or any other, no
matter what befell the exchange,” said Finan.
“If I chose a Windows platform, I would also have to buy
different packages and a licence for every single thing. It becomes
very expensive.”
He added, “We have been bowled over by how reliable and stable
it is. We are now going to roll out more applications based on this
Linux framework.”