IT Brief New Zealand - Technology news for CIOs & IT decision-makers
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Sun, 1st Feb 2009
FYI, this story is more than a year old

It's time to consider some alternatives, says Open Systems Specialists

IT organisations are facing continued pressure to support the business by delivering more with less, and also to provide a competitive edge in an increasingly ferocious marketplace.On top of this, organisations are seeking growth, consolidation and sometimes a reduction in size or capability due to market and economic conditions.

Clearly many organisations are now looking for alternatives to the traditional IT capability model because they cannot continue to do things in the same old way.

Flexibility, lower costs Many IT suppliers are now building business applications with open source technologies; more often than not these applications are web oriented and delivered on an existing web infrastructure layer. Key characteristics of these applications are rapid delivery, flexibility to change quickly and lower cost.IT organisations are also looking at alternatives to proprietary offerings for cross-business functionality – mail, collaboration and customer relationship management are examples.

Again, these are seen as opportunities to lower costs in areas and functions that are becoming seen as ‘commodity'.

Government is becoming more aware of the benefits of an open source approach not only in the cost area, but also because of the growing, world recognised, input and contribution of the New Zealand open source community.

Still the same

Everyone knows about open source web browsers (Firefox is the obvious example) being downloaded and used by many companies and individuals as an alternative to the proprietary browser shipped with the pre-installed operating system on your desktop or laptop. OpenOffice suite is another example that can be easily downloaded and installed. This even opens and saves files in file formats that proprietary office suites maintain, and also can directly save files in Adobe PDF format without the need for additional products

.Although the ability to decide to go open source has become more obvious as the adoption of open source software becomes mainstream in the IT industry, the path to get there is fraught with the same questions and challenges as that of commercial software:* IT architectural and technical staff still have to consider which components to use and how to implement them to ensure flexibility and interoperability, and to guarantee the infrastructure is sustainable.* The business still needs to be concerned about how to best meet the requirements, to get the strongest return on investment and to retain the ability to cope with dynamics of current economics.

Like other providers, OSS relies on its team to deliver quality support and services in providing open source infrastructure solutions. Based on our intellectual property and track record, we help our clients to get the best that open source can offer.

We have seen the growth in deployment of Linux-based infrastructure in New Zealand over the last 10 years – today banking and finance, travel, transport and government/SOE organisations deploy Linux for mission-critical applications and services.

Systems management, monitoring and reporting functions can also be provided by open source solutions. Systems Management applications such as Nagios are being increasingly deployed in New Zealand IT infrastructures due to its functionality, as well as ease of use.

The next layer up – middleware – is also becoming more prevalently open source – firewall, database, web and application serving layers of IT infrastructure can all be provided by open source software.

And, as mentioned earlier, functions such as email, collaboration, word processing and spreadsheet applications all have full-function, stable, open source alternatives available and in use in New Zealand.

Open source CRM applications, such as SugarCRM, are used by small to medium business in New Zealand (including here at OSS), but they have been successfully deployed at large enterprises overseas – they can scale, are reliable and provide the right level of function for most business needs.

Virtualisation and identity management

In the past couple of years we have seen some very successful and significant projects undertaken in various areas of enterprise IT infrastructure. Just one example is the Bank of New Zealand, which last year announced it was phasing out around 500 servers through a virtualisation programme. Open source virtualisation and open source identity management are hot topics right now as key components to deliver cost saving and flexibility.

Equally important is open source web infrastructure, which frankly is an easy choice to make due to the low risk and low cost associated with the worldwide adoption of Apache.The next step up the ladder – open source alternatives in the database and web application serving layer – is expected to see widespread adoption and deployment in 2009.

Open source groupware solutions offer an easy replacement for propriety collaboration and word processing/spreadsheet function suites, and open source monitoring solutions compete very well against the expensive and often limited proprietary offerings.

At OSS, we use open source software for all our IT functions where we can, and we believe the time is right for all IT organisations to consider doing the same.All you have to do is look at the alternatives, assess the options, then make the choice...