Enterprises break open the proprietary mould

Open source’s wel­come embrace of inter­ac­tive com­mu­ni­ty engage­ment and its inher­ent diver­si­ty was always going to unset­tle the tra­di­tion­al busi­ness sector’s approach to soft­ware. In the locked-down world of enter­prise IT, pro­pri­etary behe­moths of both hard­ware and soft­ware dom­i­nat­ed for more than half a cen­tu­ry, so change was nev­er going to hap­pen overnight.

There is no such thing as a “free lunch” and the con­cept of offer­ing open source appli­ca­tions with no charge to enter­prise is no dif­fer­ent. Sun Microsys­tems, despite being pri­mar­i­ly known for its serv­er and stor­age hard­ware, was also the lead devel­op­er and organ­is­er of the Java oper­at­ing sys­tem com­mu­ni­ty. Pri­or to its acqui­si­tion by Ora­cle in April 2009, Sun’s pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive Jonathan Schwartz used the 2008 JavaOne con­fer­ence to explain the work­ings of the open mod­el.

“The soft­ware is free but, when you want the sup­port and main­te­nance, we’ll be there to sell that to you,” he announced.

The same mod­el is found at Red Hat where the firm is a major con­trib­u­tor to the free Fedo­ra Lin­ux oper­at­ing sys­tem project, but also sells Red Hat Enter­prise Lin­ux, a sup­port­ed release for com­mer­cial use.

Open source can offer huge ben­e­fits, enabling faster inno­va­tion and reduced total cost of own­er­ship

The ques­tion aris­es, irre­spec­tive of flex­i­bil­i­ty and con­trol fac­tors, can return on invest­ment (ROI) and total cost of own­er­ship (TCO) actu­al­ly be improved inside the open com­put­ing mod­el?

ROI is always hard to gauge if a firm is mov­ing to Lin­ux and oth­er open plat­form tech­nolo­gies because a cer­tain amount of train­ing and reskilling will typ­i­cal­ly be involved. While forced upgrades and prod­uct end-of-life announce­ments may become a less-preva­lent fea­ture, licens­ing and reg­u­la­to­ry com­pli­ance issues are by no means equal­ly reduced.

TCO is prob­a­bly eas­i­er to analyse as long as we accept the dif­fer­ence between “gratis” ver­sus “libre” and recog­nise that there is a cost asso­ci­at­ed with so-called free soft­ware. Free Soft­ware Foun­da­tion and GNU Project founder Richard Stall­man famous­ly explained that we should think “Free – as in free speech, not as in free beer”. By this mea­sure, Lin­ux still incurs sup­port costs and a firm will still need to pay for elec­tric­i­ty, inter­net band­width, data stor­age and back-up charges, plus all tra­di­tion­al busi­ness costs from equip­ment insur­ance to air con­di­tion­ing.

Enter­pris­es can improve ROI and TCO if open tech­nolo­gies are embraced for their core func­tion­al ben­e­fits. If a com­pa­ny has a com­pe­tent set of in-house soft­ware devel­op­ers or a trust­ed third par­ty work­ing with open source code, then there is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to react to change and mod­i­fy soft­ware more quick­ly.

Access to the code gave rise to claims of a lack of robust­ness in deploy­ments of Lin­ux and its many vari­ants in heavy­weight busi­ness envi­ron­ments. In the mid-1990s, these per­cep­tions began to change and, pre­dom­i­nant­ly at the serv­er lev­el, open source start­ed to emerge as a viable, adapt­able and secure alter­na­tive to pro­pri­etary solu­tions.

“Open source soft­ware is proven to be secure and reli­able for all busi­ness func­tions, includ­ing those which han­dle sen­si­tive and finan­cial cus­tomer data,” says Steve George, vice pres­i­dent of prod­ucts and com­mu­ni­ca­tions at Canon­i­cal. “In fact, many open source organ­i­sa­tions specif­i­cal­ly tar­get the pub­lic sec­tor, such as defence and health­care, where secu­ri­ty is para­mount. It’s exis­tence is much, much more preva­lent than many peo­ple realise.”

As we now move to cloud com­put­ing envi­ron­ments, where the so-called vir­tu­al­i­sa­tion of host­ed com­put­ing resources sup­port the needs of IT, open tech­nolo­gies appear to be lead­ing some­thing of a charge. Let­ter­Gen, a Bel­gian sup­pli­er of doc­u­ment man­age­ment soft­ware, migrat­ed its vir­tu­alised sys­tems from VMware to the ful­ly open source Red Hat Enter­prise Vir­tu­al­i­sa­tion plat­form late last year.

Luc Van­der­goten, chief exec­u­tive of Let­ter­Gen, explains: “We made the strate­gic deci­sion to migrate for a vari­ety of rea­sons but, in par­tic­u­lar, we were impressed by Red Hat’s sub­scrip­tion mod­el that has no high up-front licence fees and costs the same each year. We expect the vir­tu­al­i­sa­tion guest rights, includ­ed in the Red Hat Enter­prise Lin­ux sub­scrip­tion, alone to lead to reduced IT-relat­ed costs by over 60 per cent.”

While tran­si­tion­ing from closed to open sys­tems is no triv­ial task, unless this step is tak­en, busi­ness­es risk being left behind

Let­ter­Gen used a live migra­tion fea­ture to move to its new infra­struc­ture and it is now able to make effi­cient use of its vir­tu­al­i­sa­tion clus­ter by mov­ing vir­tu­al machines from one host to anoth­er with­out affect­ing per­for­mance. “In addi­tion, the main­te­nance man­age­ment func­tions enable hosts to be upgrad­ed and main­tained while the vir­tu­al machines are run­ning. The result has been much less down­time and much high­er avail­abil­i­ty,” says Mr Van­der­goten.

As open source con­tin­ues its con­cert­ed, but com­par­a­tive­ly non-aggres­sive encroach­ment across the new­ly cloud-enabled enter­prise, what soft­ware appli­ca­tion areas are we most like­ly to see open plat­forms sup­port­ing? Con­tin­u­ing Linux’s prox­im­i­ty to “low­er-lev­el”, data-cen­tric func­tions, open source finds much suc­cess when employed to dri­ve ele­ments, such as appli­ca­tion servers, soft­ware code change man­age­ment sys­tems and con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems.

This back-office IT trend is chang­ing though. As open source gets ever clos­er to users’ desk­tops, as a Win­dows or Apple OS X alter­na­tive, so it also finds suc­cess in the busi­ness- func­tion space when used as an enter­prise resource plan­ning (ERP) tool, a busi­ness process man­age­ment (BPM) lay­er, and as an exec­u­tive-fac­ing busi­ness intel­li­gence (BI) tool, often run­ning on a cloud plat­form.

Spawn­ing a healthy pro­por­tion of cloud imple­men­ta­tions right now is Open­Stack, an infra­struc­ture-as-a-ser­vice project ini­ti­at­ed by cloud-host­ing com­pa­ny Rack­space in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the US space agency NASA two years ago. Sub­se­quent­ly, the cloud tech­nol­o­gy stack devel­oped by the two com­pa­nies has been open sourced and hand­ed over to its com­mu­ni­ty of users for fur­ther devel­op­ment.

Backed by more than 180 tech­nol­o­gy ven­dors, Open­Stack has been suc­cess­ful in terms of paving the way for open com­put­ing plat­forms in the cloud are­na. Web­site and web appli­ca­tion test­ing com­pa­ny Soas­ta used Rackspace’s Cloud Servers prod­uct on the Open­Stack plat­form to pro­vide cus­tomers, includ­ing the Lon­don 2012 Olympic Com­mit­tee, with its Cloud-Test ser­vice.

This ser­vice enables com­pa­nies to analyse their site and appli­ca­tion per­for­mance in response to sim­u­lat­ed high-traf­fic bursts. In pro­vid­ing this ser­vice, Tom Louni­bos, pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive of Soas­ta, placed his faith in the open cloud.

“What Open­Stack does for us is to give us options – and real­ly pow­er­ful options – because so many com­pa­nies are now mov­ing toward Open­Stack. We see this as an explo­sion of capac­i­ty and loca­tions, which are very impor­tant to us. We think Open­Stack is a very pow­er­ful play­er in the cloud com­mu­ni­ty and will be the future of cloud com­put­ing as we go for­ward,” he says.

An impor­tant caveat is that, even where open source solu­tions are deployed at the enter­prise lev­el, some cus­tomers will work in envi­ron­ments where imple­men­ta­tion of com­mer­cial­ly sup­port­ed code is manda­to­ry because they are bound by a stip­u­lat­ed lev­el of risk due to the sen­si­tive nature of their work.

Appli­ca­tion deploy­ment sce­nar­ios, such as those found in aero­space, gov­ern­ment or health­care, for exam­ple, will need their soft­ware code more firm­ly locked down than oth­ers. Open soft­ware is built with inher­ent­ly dynam­ic soft­ware code that is, by its very nature, change­able and cus­tomis­able. In envi­ron­ments where com­pli­ance and gov­er­nance con­cerns demand it, a hard­ened ver­sion of “sta­t­ic code” is avail­able – once again at a price.

Proof that open source can be imple­ment­ed suc­cess­ful­ly in the aero­space sec­tor is found in trav­el trans­ac­tion pro­cess­ing com­pa­ny Amadeus. The firm tran­si­tioned to open plat­forms and says that, even in its demand­ing high-vol­ume trans­ac­tion pro­cess­ing envi­ron­ment, open sys­tems have proven not just fit-for-pur­pose, but also crit­i­cal to help­ing the busi­ness trans­form how it oper­ates.

“Open source can offer huge ben­e­fits, enabling faster inno­va­tion and reduced total cost of own­er­ship. While tran­si­tion­ing from closed to open sys­tems is no triv­ial task, unless this step is tak­en, busi­ness­es risk being left behind as their com­peti­tors cap­i­talise on the new pos­si­bil­i­ties this offers,” says Hervé Cou­turi­er, exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of devel­op­ment for the Amadeus IT Group.

While we can almost cer­tain­ly define the cur­rent decade as a sig­nif­i­cant inflex­ion point for the wide-scale imple­men­ta­tion of open source tech­nolo­gies from the cloud to the desk­top, what role Microsoft or Apple will play is hard­er to pre­dict. Microsoft has made its own not incon­sid­er­able for­ays into open source and has been part­ner­ing for the sake of inter­op­er­abil­i­ty with open plat­form play­ers for some years now.

Futur­ists and open source evan­ge­lists alike argue that that the future is open for soft­ware, hard­ware and the plat­forms that we use to build both our infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy and every­thing from bicy­cles to motor cars.

“Today it’s com­mon to see open source tech­nol­o­gy pow­er­ing all areas of the enter­prise right from infra­struc­ture to busi­ness-crit­i­cal appli­ca­tions and the desk­top,” says Canonical’s Mr George. “Because open source is prime for web, intranet, file and serv­er, it means that it’s pos­si­ble for new and large-scale web-based organ­i­sa­tions, such as Quo­ra and Insta­gram, to build and run their entire busi­ness on it.”

As we stand today, it is 100 years between the inven­tion of the auto­lathe process to man­u­fac­ture stan­dard com­po­nent engi­neer­ing parts, such as the stan­dard screw, and the sub­se­quent inven­tion and con­struc­tion of the jet air­lin­er. Com­mon open stan­dards that dri­ve inno­va­tion always win in the end.

Open source’s welcome embrace of interactive community engagement and its inherent diversity was always going to unsettle the traditional business sector’s approach to software. In the locked-down world of enterprise IT, proprietary behemoths of both hardware and software dominated for more than half a century, so change was never going to happen overnight.