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Credit crunch moves business to adopt open source

The adoption of open source increases as businesses look to tighten their IT budgets.

By Asavin Wattanajantra, 13 Oct 2008 at 14:49

UK businesses and government agencies are increasingly adopting open source technology solutions as the credit crunch takes hold, according to open source firm Alfresco Software.

It was claimed to be a reversal of the trend seen during the second half of 2007, with companies looking for better value for money when renewing software licenses. The UK, traditionally cautious when it came to open source, also had the second strongest growth market after the US.

Alfresco then proceeded to reel off a list of customers which were in the process of rolling out its Enterprise Content Management (ECM) open source solutions this year, including Betfair, National Rail and Bristol City Council.

It claimed open source offered reductions in license fees as well as the benefit of not being ‘tied-in’ to propriety software.

“The world is undergoing serious economic turbulence, but at a time when businesses know they simply cannot terminate IT projects, open source software providers the perfect solution,” claimed John Powell, Alfresco chief executive.

He said that with open source, public and private sector companies resisted the demands of proprietary vendors, created a flexible infrastructure as well as lower IT spend.

He added: “Open source powers the internet today and that low cost scalability is coming to UK enterprises. Today the agenda is reducing cost and improving productivity with resources that you have.”

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2 comments

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Smoke & Mirrors

Hi, Firstly, you will always find the smallest organisations making the loudest noise about how things are working out for them or how well or big they are doing. I could think of a couple in the UK alone within the reseller community. Shame to see a vendor joining the same \"deceptive\" tactics. Secondly, OSS is only really \"cheap\" on acquisition and then again by the time you acquire what you need for secure authentication, auditing, archiving and all the \"smole & mirrors\" inflated professional services fees that go with that you have spent WELL over what Microsoft or even IBM would have charged you in the first place...then of course there is support...I guess one need to seriously consider TCO but that may not be all that PC nowadays or is it?

By achristo on Tuesday Oct 14

Typical claim of FOSS advocate

As mentioned by achristo, the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community are quick to point out the lack of licensing fees, but completely neglect every other related cost which will FAR EXCEED the few pennies the customer saves from not buying software. I suppose if you are a \'mom and pop\' business and don\'t have to worry about deploying thousands of desktops across an enterprise, retraining thousands of users and giving those users tools that don\'t work well with anyone outside the organization, I suppose FOSS is great. Of course, you\'d also have to completely ignore interoperability between applications. This is painfully obvious the first time you try something as simply as copying and pasting a spreadsheet into a document in OpenOffice. The interface between most Linux applications is either non-existent or somewhere in the stone age. Does your business have time to re-invent the wheel? Do you have a team of Linux geeks on-staff to try and figure out how to make your accounting package talk to your authentication system? What is the cost of \'lost opportunity\' as you pi$$ all your time away trying to cobble these disparate applications together? Ready to run your business on FOSS? Well, best of luck to you -- you\'ll need it! (Luck and a TON of money to get everything a real business needs to run that is...)

By Ip_marty64c3705b on Wednesday Oct 15