CTO Blog
We talk a lot about new technologies but less about some of the implications. Take the software provisioning model, yes it’s all about ‘as a service’, but go a little further into this. Yes, we are changing the provisioning of software, but that is because the purposes people want to use software for are also changing. It then follows that the development of software itself will also change.
Little more than three years ago open-source software (OSS) was being positioned as something not suitable for the mainstream IT market with a series of implied risk statements about its fitness for use at an enterprise level. The use of Linux as a low cost operating system was acceptable, as was the increasing use of the so called LAMP stack, standing for Linux OS, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP, Perl or Python scripting languages, to support web-based activities. Today many of the major proprietary software vendors who were vehemently attacking OSS have moved to embrace it as part of their product portfolio and can be found making contributions. In the USA the White House website has been shifted to OSS, in the UK the London Stock Exchange has adopted it for its high profile ultra reliable environment, and in Norway using proprietary software has become the exception with OSS the de facto approach.
The original debate on the use of OSS focused almost entirely on cost, the standard rating value of conventional IT, but the reasons for adoption have changed as the business and technology environment has also changed over the last two years. Today, time to change and frequency of change are big issues as enterprises struggle to cope with recession, global competition, new markets, as well as the overall shift to an ‘online’ business world. The major issue has become the terms of the license for the use of software. Proprietary software is licensed in a manner that is deliberately restrictive, and deterministic with respect to the number of users or processors, as well as the fact that access to the core elements is closed. All of this made sense in the context of the original enterprise use, the more limited skills in software development and the need to guarantee a revenue stream to pay for bug fixes, upgrades and other ongoing requirements.
Today the freedom of OSS licensing models, in combination with a development model, suits the faster moving, more distributed and fragmented use of software across the entire enterprise. Indeed the people-driven activities taking place at the edge of the enterprise and the marketplace can arguably only be served by the OSS model. Why? Because it is comprised of an unknown number of people, on an unknown set of processors whose interaction is neither predetermined, nor likely to be long lasting!
The acceptance of OSS is as much a feature of new business demands introducing new usage models as any other factor. These are the same factors that are driving the cloud as a new way of provisioning technology and software towards a distinctively different set of business activities. This shift in business priorities shows clearly in this analysis by Gartner made available on their website for download, as does the misalignment with traditional IT priorities! Every one of the top ten business priorities, except one, is focused towards the edge of the enterprise, people-centric activities and markets with the likelihood that the OSS license model will be required.
Quite frankly in this new world the question might well have become ‘is there any reason not to use open source?’ And then the rest of the question might be ‘is it time to review our overall approach to development for this new environment and set of business requirements’?
Kind of puts a different spin on the whole open source debate when you think like this!
About the author
Capgemini Global Chief Technology Officer, Andy is a member of the Capgemini Group management board and advises on all aspects of technology-driven market changes, together with being a member of the Policy Board for the British Computer Society. Andy is the author of many white papers, and the co-author three books that have charted the current changes in technology and its use by business starting in 2006 with ‘Mashup Corporations’ detailing how enterprises could make use of Web 2.0 to develop new go to market propositions. This was followed in May 2008 by Mesh Collaboration focussing on the impact of Web 2.0 on the enterprise front office and its working techniques, then in 2010 “Enterprise Cloud Computing: A Strategy Guide for Business and Technology leaders” co-authored with well-known academic Peter Fingar and one of the leading authorities on business process, John Pyke. The book describes the wider business implications of Cloud Computing with the promise of on-demand business innovation. It looks at how businesses trade differently on the web using mash-ups but also the challenges in managing more frequent change through social tools, and what happens when cloud comes into play in fully fledged operations. Andy was voted one of the top 25 most influential CTOs in the world in 2009 by InfoWorld and is grateful to readers of Computing Weekly who voted the Capgemini CTOblog the best Blog for Business Managers and CIOs each year for the last three years.
sadly a lot of posts these days such as the last one are no more than publicising their own site. maybe they dont think i actually read and follow back the urls for anythingposted? this spammer’s url leads to his site promising a service to divert traffic to your site. if this an example of their work its pretty clumsey!
If your assertion were true then take up of OSS would be much higher than it is. I realise that the availability of developers for existing proprietary software (and by extension their relatively low cost) is one of the factors that reduces takeup of OSS in the enterprise, but many businesses (including my own) will stick with proprietary for the forseeable future.
Taking Microsoft as one of the better examples of major software vendors, their licensing model has become a lot more open (no doubt in response to OSS) and in some cases the cost is negligible. In addition their community has become very strong in recent years through sites such as CodePlex and the MVP program. My business uses Microsoft because via the BizSpark program we get tens of thousands pounds worth of software for next to nothing – which (and this is the crux of the issue) is better than anything we can get Open Source. Sure, as a developer I like to play around with code and find out how things work, but as a business person I want the platform that will give me quickest time to market and provide me with the least headaches when hiring. Maintainability and consistency across the stack is what matters and as nice as it sounds to be able to make changes to code to support features that the vendor doesn’t – that just isn’t going to happen. In any case, there are plenty of component vendors who make a nice living out of extending the feature set of proprietary products. They probably invest millions of pounds producing their suites, which enables me to then pay them about 400 quid for the output. Economies of scale are the only way that software can continue to develop – most businesses simply cannot afford the cost that specialisation incurs.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some great OSS and free products out there (NetBeans is a particular favourite) but TCO is still a very real concern in the current climate.
hi ben My point was more based on licensing restrictions on use more than any other factors such as quality, maintainability or cost. As more requirements contain an external element together with an unknown factor in terms of numbers of users, and / or processors etc the traditional license models simply wont do.
I believe that this, together with a shift in funding models from Capex to Opex will and are all driving a shift towards a greater need for a different licensing model.
btw took a look at your own blog and for those interested in software development good place to go for a browse.