Frankly, its been a revelation to me. Long have I been an advocate of enterprise systems and have been pretty slow in appreciating the capability and penetration of systems that built on open source. These systems, shorn of blinkered enterprise development requirements, has me and I am now a fan. In areas such as IT security, web-conferencing solutions, document management, collaboration, social networking, operating systems and CRM, customers are now willing to actually evaluate the possibility of deploying open source tools and technologies, even though they may have already invested in formal enterprise systems of a similar nature. The business driver for such implementation being unrealized business benefits or complex and incomplete installation of enterprise applications.
Open Source is here to stay. Consultants will ignore open source at their peril, especially because of the lean economic scenario that we are enmeshed in now. As the tribe of open source proponents increases, so is the breadth of their imagination. I am waiting for the day, when a client actually asks me to scout for an ERP - built on the principles of open software, because they want to avoid license costs as well as the real killer - AMC.
Implementation costs on open source framework as well as support capabilities of vendors are the two concerns that consultants who prospect such solutions will have to factor in, during their due diligence. Currently, there is no metric to judge cost of development or maintenance for deployment on open architecture. Assurance of performance is another area that needs addressal as is a framework for risk assessment of projects that are using open frameworks. Once a rationale for this is crystallized, development and maintenance of complex enterprise systems will emerge into a new paradigm.
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