CIOs can make considerable savings on IT projects by
using open source products rather than commercial software in the
face of the economic downturn.
"In difficult economic conditions the open source message sells
well," said Jim Whitehurst, chief executive of Linux distributor
Red Hat in an interview with Computer Weekly last week.
If the company's finances are anything to go by, open source is
increasingly finding favour in IT departments. Whitehurst says Red
Hat has grown 30% year on year.
Open source is effectively free. Red Hat is available under the
GNU General Public licence (GPL) users can download the
software from the company's website and only pay Red Hat for
support, maintenance and IT services.
And importantly, Users of open source system do not have to
worry about managing licenses. Michel Kahn, group chief information
officer of
Specsavers has chosen open source for a number of components in
the retailer's store expansion plan. He says, "Our over-ridding
objective has been to expand the number of stores at relatively low
IT costs."
A study from
Forrester Research has shown that CIOs regard lower costs as
the main driver for using open source products. One interviewee
disclosed that his organisation saved €900,000 over three years by
replacing a commercial application server with the
JBoss open-source application server. And the enterprise
architect from the company that replaced multiple Unix systems with
a single Linux distribution said that this change cut
administration costs by half.
"It is not just the cost of the licence, but also the fact that
people have to pay between 20-25% of the value of the licence per
year on an annual maintenance agreement with commercial products,"
says Jeffery Hammond, senior analyst at Forrester.
First, businesses do not have to buy any support unless they
need it. "So if a company has 200 software developers and pays
$750-$1,000 a year on maintenance support for its integrated
development environment, the annual maintenance charge is
$175,000.
With an open source integrated development environmnetsuch
asEclipse, you can go directly to the open source community or
pay a system integrator to provide the support," he says.
Truck and bus manufacturer
Scania, for example, is supporting Red Hat in-house. Scania
uses Red Hat Satellite Server to maintain local control over the
management, administration and monitoring of its systems.
It is highly unlikely businesses will rip out and replace
existing commercial products with open source alternatives. But
using Linux and open source software in new projects, can help CIOs
stretch their shrinking IT budgets a bit further.