Open source softwareis seeing slow
but steady adoption among large UK businesses as they begin to take
it to the heart of their organisations. One key factor that has
held back adoption has been a lack of enterprise-class support and
services, but this is changing.
The open source community has been addressing the demand for
high-quality open source support, and over the past few years new
enterprise service companies have emerged and entered the area
dominated by the likes of
Red Hat,
Novell and IBM.
Steve Craggs, director of analyst firm Lustratus, says that the
key question enterprises ask is: can open source software be
supported effectively in mission-critical environments?
Up until recently, the answer has been no, says Craggs. "We are
still not at the stage where companies are deploying open source
heavily they are maybe using it for a low-priority project, but not
necessarily a mission critical one."
Support issues
Lack of support across the whole software stack has also been a
problem in the past, he says. "You have to be very careful that the
contract will support the whole stack. Linux was successful because
Red Hat stood up and says it will support the stack," says
Craggs.
However, Craggs says that there are now a number of professional
services firms that are offering tiered support for the whole open
source software stack. This support typically ranges from
supporting applications on a same-day basis, with immediate phone
contact, to round the clock "24x7" support.
Service firms are also supplying stacks that they verify will
interoperate with a list of applications.
Another issue is whether the contract includes indemnity, which
means a business cannot be prosecuted if an open source tool is
discovered to have used "lifted" code. Some open source support
firms, such as MuleSource,
are willing to offer such indemnity, but not all.
Peter Dawes-Huish is chief executive officer of professional
services firm LinuxIT, and is also on the panel of experts at
financial services firm Standards & Poor's, providing advice to
large companies on the adoption of open source and Linux.
He describes the open source and Linux world as a "minefield",
which does not help to allay the concerns of large organisations
that might use software created by community projects.
For Dawes-Huish, the key is for service firms such as LinuxIT to
offer support and services that rival the packaged application
world.
LinuxIT primarily offers consulting, integration and
round-the-clock support services based around the popular Red Hat
Linux and
SuSE Linux operating systems, as well as a set of open source
and proprietary applications and databases that include
Oracle, Sybase,
VMware, Kerio MailServer and WinRoute Firewall.
LinuxIT envisages itself in the middle tier of open source
support, with the top tier including IBM, Dimension Data, and HP.
In fact, LinuxIT's single biggest customer is HP, according to
Dawes-Huish, partly because of the technical expertise within
LinuxIT's support team.
The firm's typical customer has between 50 and 100 servers, and
wants to run mission-critical applications on them. They also have
a mixed environment of proprietary and open source software.
"We are a partner of the major Linux organisations and also
Microsoft, and some of our biggest projects involve the
interoperability of Microsoft and Linux. Our aim is to offer the
best solutions within the constraints of the customer," says
Dawes-Huish.
Its customers include three large telecoms firms and the Clyde
& Forth Press Group of newspapers, where it carried out a major
infrastructure and e-mail replacement.
It also provides services to a large logistics company, which
runs a couple of hundred PCs across eight depots, and uses open
source Java-based applications, and Linux-based
thin-client desktops and servers to run key systems.
Sirius IT is another professional services firm that offers open
source systems integration and support to large firms.
Its chief executive, Mark Taylor, says that over the past few
years, he has seen enterprises "going up the stack" in terms of
their requirements of open source software.
He says that as well as using open source for networking
infrastructure, directory services, enterprise file and print,
users are now looking into
CRM and enterprise resource planning using open source
databases such as
PostgreSQL.
But he says, "ERP is still in the early-adopter mode, but we are
aware of largish £1bn to £2bn per annum companies that are adopting
open source for more critical applications."
The role of Web 2.0
Where Taylor is seeing some movement at the moment is in Web
2.0-style applications. Sirius IT recently carried out some work
with the Linde Group, which owns BOC, to set up an open source
system to run its internal "wikipedia" knowledge management
tool.
As well as the Linde Group, Sirius IT's customers also include
Linklaters LLP, Pentax, the Countryside Council for Wales and
Specsavers.
Taylor says that organisations have moved from asking for
strategic help with open source projects to support for their open
source applications. In addition, over the past two to three years,
they have started requesting a wider range of managed services.
As a result, services firms such as Sirius IT can offer users
more in-depth open source services. For example, it helped Pindar,
an electronic media company, to migrate from an Oracle database to
Postgre over the past three years, carrying out the strategy,
deployment and support.
"We have a Postgre team member on staff in our office, good
links with the Postgre community, and reasonable access to the open
source process. This means we can modify the source code, to
counter interoperability problems," Taylor says.
Sirius IT and other service firms can also offer full open
source application
outsourcing, a trend that has emerged over the past year or so.
Osborne Books is an example of a user Sirius IT offers outsourcing
services to the IT firm manages its online books operation.
Professional services firm Credativ is a new arrival in the UK,
headquartered in Germany, and offering high-quality Linux support
services.
Its 38 staff are all technically literate and heavily involved
in a number of open source distributions, being key players in the
open source community.
As a result, the firm says that when its users call the
helpline, they will go straight through to a technical person. Its
customers range from SMEs to large enterprises.
Credativ supports Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Red Hat, Xandros, Gnome
and KDE operating systems, as well as PostgreSQL and
MySQL databases and a range of enterprise applications.
Its packages are modular and range from the basic (at £135 per
month, two hours support with an eight-hour response time) to the
comprehensive (24x7, 365 days a year) package.
Chris Halls, managing director at Credativ UK, says, "Until now,
the level of support equivalent to that offered by commercial
vendors has not been available to open source users. We believe
that our comprehensive support service is crucial to encouraging
more organisations to join the growing movement towards adopting
free software in business.
"By offering a support package equivalent to those available to
proprietary software users, we believe that more organisations will
feel secure in the knowledge that their free software
implementations are supported to the highest level."
This one-stop-shop approach is characteristic of the new breed
of open source professional services firms.
However, many open source organisations have grown from offering
a single open source product, for which they are now offering
enterprise support.
One such organisation is Ingres, which made its name as being
CA's relational database. However, John Smedley, senior consultant
at Ingres, says the firm has now evolved into a broader services
firm.
It offers and supports a range of products such as the Ingres BI
(business intelligence) Appliance, and Ingres ECM (enterprise
content management) Appliance.
Smedley says that 2008 will be an important year for enterprise
open source initiatives. "The Dutch government has set 2008 as a
deadline to adopt open source software the 2008 Olympic Committee
is considering a switch to open source technology and suppliers
such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are embracing open source," he
says.
Mulesource is another example of a professional services firm
that grew out of an open source technology.
Ross Mason is chief technology officer and co-founder of
MuleSource, and creator of the Mule project, a popular open source
enterprise service bus (ESB).
Mason says, "The Mule integration and SOA (service oriented
architecture) platform has had more than a million downloads and is
in production in more than 2,000 sites worldwide that we know of.
These figures have increased exponentially since we created
MuleSource to support users worldwide."
He says, "The advantage of open source is that enterprises can
download the software and try it out before taking the step to
actually deploy it. In Mule's case, this is done by the project
developers and architects. However once the decision gets to the
CIO or director level, that is when enterprise support becomes
essential, particularly large enterprises, where the ESB is the
cornerstone of SOA initiatives and integration projects."
Walmart.com is an example of a Mule enterprise user, with Mule
providing the messaging backbone to its e-commerce site.
"They are looking for reassurance that there is a legal entity
behind the software and a physical company that can provide
enterprise-class support 24x7 for such a mission critical
deployment. We also offer indemnity, which is often a luxury for
open source projects but a valuable legal safeguard for enterprises
deploying open source software," Mason says.
Open source professional services firms are racing to compete
with proprietary software suppliers. They are raising the quality
of their enterprise support, partnering more effectively with
proprietary technology suppliers and offering strong links with the
open source community. It is only matter of time before more
well-known firms fly the flag for open source.