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