The Benefits of Commercial Open Source

Transcription

1 The Benefits of Commercial Open Source Empower your Audience This white paper explains how and why Enterprises significantly benefit from Commercial Open Source solutions. The Commercial Open Source model may, at its surface, seem like the junior version of buying proprietary software. But if your procurement process treats it that way, you miss out on a number of advantages for your organization. The real value of today s Commercial Open Source is the inherent flexibility and freedom. This freedom allows you to reduce time-tomarket, enables you to create more innovative business driven solutions and lowers Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Colofon Author: Jeroen M. Verberg Get in touch with Hippo: info@onehippo.com North America: (toll free) Europe:

2 Preface In most enterprises the software technology landscape is a patchwork consisting of bestof- breed solutions, big vendor platforms and custom legacy applications. While internal and external customers expect all this to work seamlessly, the challenge that corporate IT faces is that business needs are changing more rapidly than ever before. With today s ubiquitous web and mobile access, customers (both internal and external) expect real-time results and transactions. The online integration between content platforms and back-office systems needs to be tight. The pressure from marketeers and sales for bringing new web solutions online is ever increasing. Therefore it s more unlikely than ever before that any out-ofthebox proprietary web content solution will fit instantly in your environment and meet every requirement. In today s enterprise environments, software systems need to be integrated, fine-tuned and adapted to meet demands of the business users and hardened to ensure security. Sometimes the extension points (called APIs) suffice, but more often they don t. The one big challenge with closed-source proprietary solutions is that you are not allowed to change the software. Bottom line: you are not allowed to see how it works or customize it to fit the unique needs of your business users, validate security or optimize the performance. Closed-source vendors leverage their power and lock-in by restricting usage scenarios. In too many cases, enterprises end up paying orders of magnitude more than the initial license fee to really use the software. Even if the vendor grants permission to make changes on your own, your investment in the software is lost forever. With every tweak you diverge away from a successful upgrade path, creating an ever-increasing maintenance cost and complexity. Therefore, at the end of the day these enterprises still end-up with custom solutions. Open Source Over recent years we have seen the enormous increase in popularity of Open Source software solutions. Where open source started out as very low-level technical solutions, over the last few years we have seen it successfully move up the stack: from operating platforms, to databases, to applications. Success stories like Linux, Apache, Spring, MySQL and now Android come to mind. Their common success comes from the fact that they are embedded in many software (and hardware) packages, because of their openness, their integration capabilities, and their ability to be adapted to unique business needs. Open Source content management platforms have seen a similar rise in popularity. Ranging now from small DIY projects to well-recognized brand name enterprise systems Open Source content management solutions are now a viable option for the enterprise. If Open Source content management systems are used as-is simply to leverage an easier User Interface (UI) for business users to move content from place to place, the benefits to the enterprise will typically be limited. The big advantage from a open-source content management platform comes from the liberty it permits. It s Free as in Freedom to adapt, customize and scale the solution to meet the needs of the organization. And, unlike other applications, content management platforms because their main function is to facilitate change require more adaptation, customization and scaling than any other types of applications. The big challenge enterprises face is how to leverage Open Source in sustainable way; because leveraging Open Source is certainly not without risks. There s no vendor to turn to in case of emergency and communities are outside the scope of control of the enterprise. Most enterprises don t want to be fully dependent on internal staff to provide that extra layer of support. They want the flexibility to out-source work, and they want to benefit from the returns to scale in software development because software development is almost never the core business of the enterprise. So, the big question for enterprises when considering open source is obviously support and continuity: who do I call for support? How do I know in what direction the software is going and how will I influence its direction? The rise of Commercial Open Source To address the Open Source challenges mentioned above a new and very successful delivery model surfaced: 2

3 Commercial support for Open Source. Companies like RedHat are helping Enterprises to enjoy the benefits and liberty of Open Source, while mitigating the risks. The traditional benefits provided by Commercial Open Source are: 1 1. Guaranteed support with service levels 2. Legal Indemnification and liability 3. Warranties 4. Regular updates and patches 5. No big upfront investment and significantly lower costs But the cost savings of open source arises not from the price of the license, but from the liberty it permits - the flexibility to use the software anyway you want, to hire experts who are free to study it, to buy in a market that s free to work directly with the source and to share the software with anyone anywhere to make your work more effective. The word free in the expression free software seduces us into believing that somehow open source subscriptions should be much cheaper than their proprietary equivalents. But the truth is that, the extra value of the liberties open source delivers means it probably should even cost more than commercial software. The fact that it doesn t is more a reflection of the ability of proprietary suppliers to convince buyers that licenses are more valuable than the totality of the solution itself. That liberty to decide whether to hire staff, subscribe or simply use at your own risk - in other words, to control your own budget and destiny rather than to hand ut control of both to a supplier - is what makes open source a massive win for most companies. These findings are also gaining widespread acceptance in the analyst community. The true benefits of Open Source are clearly articulated in research from Accenture2, Gartner3 and the 451-Group: While cost remains the key benefit for organizations deciding on open source software, flexibility emerges as the primary benefit after open source software has been adopted, according to our survey. Cost remains a key benefit, of course, but we also see other factors, such as reliability, performance and speed cited by survey respondents. 3 Critics, as was pointed out by Simon Phipps1, will say that while these are interesting benefits, they are nothing more than a junior version of regular commercial software licensing. When you procure proprietary software, you only buy the right-to-use the software and then a separate support agreement entitles you to updates and varying levels of upgrade assurance. They argue that you should compare the subscription cost only with the cost of a proprietary support agreement. So the only potential benefit is the license costs saved. Therefore these additional benefits of Commercial Open Source are crucial for the Enterprise: Road-map alignment Liberty / Freedom Interoperability Road-map alignment is a crucial benefit you gain from Commercial Open Source where the customer s interest is brought forward inside the community. Enterprises need to increase the speed of development in order to

4 improve time-to-market, increase reach and conversion. The model Commercial Open Source uses allows you to gain that speed. Incorporating modifications to the core are part of the business model; not a struggle as with proprietary software, where in a worst-case scenario, you will end up with a fully customized platform on a closed source solution where you pay the maintenance fee, but cannot upgrade (in order to get new features or improve stability). With Open source your investment will not be lost. Summary The big benefit of Open Source software is not the reduced license costs per se, but the flexibility it brings. With open source interoperability and connectivity with existing infrastructure and platforms is easier to achieve. The liberty to adapt the software to the demands from business users is an inherent feature. The Commercial Open Source model gives you the best of both worlds: the Quality-of-Service and security of professional support and the flexibility and freedom of Open Source. By empowering enterprises and putting them back in the driver s seat, commercial open source helps driving down the costs and be more competitive at the same time. Recources 1) Source javase/opensource_phipps/ 2) Source 3) Source 4) Source: opensource/2009/12/14/open-source-means-costsavings/ 4

5 About Hippo 5 At Hippo, we believe, digital is here to make our lives a little bit better. Hippo sets the standard for how organizations can bring real-time relevance to their audience and is the foundation for personalized communication across all channels: mobile, social and web. Our purpose is to facilitate innovation so our customers can create digital miracles. We serve our customers, by creating a platform that is fun to use, easy to implement and open for innovation. Hippo CMS is a powerful, enterprise-class foundation to deliver outstanding Customer Experiences based on Enterprise Agility and Innovation Power. Hippo CMS is open source, 100% Java and convinces with its lean product architecture that is built for uptime, security and performance. Our dedicated, Certified Partner Network delivers Hippo Awesomeness around the globe to our valued customers. Hippo is proud to serve organizations such as Disney, British Telecom, Dolce & Gabbana, Max Bahr, the Dutch Police, Thomson Reuters and Crédit Agricole. Hippo is headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Boston, USA. Curious for more? Visit