Open Source: Time to Deliver on the Promises

Every major downturn results in some paradigm shift in business models. Very

often, the drivers of those new models are not revolutionary new ideas but some

of the existing experimentations which become far more relevant in a changed

business environment. The last such big thing was off-shoring, which existed as

isolated experimentations by companies such as American Express and British

Airways. But as Tom Friedman rightly pointed out, after the telecom bust of

2000, when bandwidth cost fell drastically, it became far more economical.

This downturnfar more severe and widespread than the dotcom/telecom bust of

2000could see a few more such phenomena when the recovery finally happens.

One of them, I believe, is open source software.

Users looking at open source in a time like this is not really surprising.

But what did come as a surprise to me is that when I informally asked more than

20 CIOs/IT heads in a forum what they were doing in the wake of tough economic

environment, some activities around open source came as the most common answer.

A similar question six months back had thrown up greening of IT as the most

popular cost saving exercise. While energy efficiency still remains high on the

agenda, open source is very clearly the new #1.

What has changed since then? For one, six months back, slowdown was still

staring Indian businesses from a distance. Most CIOs whom I had spoken at that

time had described the problem as that of cash-flow and not really a slowdown.

That has changed for sure.

But the real reason, as one CIO put it nicely, because it will give better

return of investment of my time and energy. He said the benefit, if the open

source experiment succeeds, will be far more sustainable and will impact the IT

costs more. In normal times, any small glitches will not be tolerated by the

users. This environment gives them a chance to try it out.

Another important reason, which CIOs dont really mention is the active

involvement of junior/middle level IT managers who see it as a great opportunity

to impress the seniors by successfully bringing down the cost of IT. Most other

IT implementation projects are usually carried out top-down.

Shyamanuja Das

Whatever the reasons are , the fact is that Indian enterprises are seriously

trying out open source for the first time.

Interestingly, two of Indias most important political parties, the Bharatiya

Janata Party (BJP) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) have advocated use

of open source in the government by putting it into their manifestos. In fact,

that is probably the only thing that the BJP and the CPI (M) agree upon!

The BJParguably the most IT-enabled political party in Indiadoes not stop

there. It claims that all the software that it uses at presentincluding the

likes of video phone softwareare on open source.

Surely, there has never been a time better than this for open source.

It is an opportunity for the open source community. But there are a few

challenges. For long, people asked a basic question: will it work/is it really

feasible? Now, they will ask business questions around reliability, scalability,

support, interoperability and so on in very clear terms. The challenge before

the open source community is to satisfy them.

It is like carrying out a revolution and at the end of revolution being able

to handle power in a mature manner. Revolution has a clearly identified enemy.

It is easy to build popular sentiment against that. But once you get power, that

must be used with maturity and responsibility.

One just hopes open source moves beyond the slogan of anti-Microsoftism and

delivers real business value. If the revolution fails this time, it may just be

a sidebar, if not a footnote, in the history of enterprise software!

The author is Editor of Dataquest.

shyamanujad@cybermedia.co.in