Open Source is Infiltrating the Enterprise

Forrester's Jeffrey Hammond Says There's Plenty of it Around, if You Look

There's a persistent perception that open source software is being ignored in the enterprise, that IT management fears it and it ends up being more costly to deploy than proprietary solutions. That's certainly the perception that some major software vendors would like you to have. But it's Jeffrey Hammond's job to dispel those perceptions, at least when they aren't accurate. As an analyst for Forrester Research, Hammond covers the world of software development as well as Web 2.0 and rich internet applications, so he sees how open source is being used on a daily basis. He'll be speaking at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, talking about the true cost of using open source, and he gave us a sample of what's going on in the enterprise at the moment.

James Turner: To begin, can you just talk about the areas you cover for Forrester?

Jeffrey Hammond: Sure. I'm in the Application Development and Program Management Group at Forrester, which means I write for folks like developers, architects and development managers. And open source is a little bit of an interesting topic for me because it kind of crosses roles. But what we tend to find is that a lot of time it's developers and maybe development managers that are pulling open source into the enterprise. And that, I think, is why I have it as a research area. But in addition to open source, I also cover Web 2.0. I cover rich internet application development. I cover software change and configuration management and application life cycle management, software modeling, mobile development, IDEs and programming languages. So a pretty wide-variety of development related stuff.

James Turner: There's obviously a lot of apocrypha and maybe even some downright misinformation about how open source is being used in the enterprise. Can you illuminate things a bit?

Jeffrey Hammond: Sure. You know, it crosses a wide-variety of spectrums. But anyone who tells you that it's not being used strategically for mission critical applications isn't talking to the right people, because I see it used that way as well as on individual projects at the departmental level. I'll give you one example: I have talked with a large organization that's using multiple open source products and projects and frameworks as the core of it's reservation systems, and they're pushing 30,000 transactions a second through what's essentially an open source infrastructure. So I defy anybody to say that that's not mission critical. And it certainly contributes revenue to their business. I've also talked to organizations that are almost completely open source in their development environment. So all of the software code that they write is being built with open source tools. I think all you have to do is look at the latest data from the Eclipse Community Survey, which they published about three weeks ago, and it's pretty hard to make the argument that open source adoption is not pervasive and accelerating in the market.

James Turner: What are some of the real success stories you've seen with open source in commercial settings?

Jeffrey Hammond: Well, I just mentioned the one about the travel and transport provider, but I've seen open source used as the basis for in-store sales systems that are PCI compliant. So that would counter another fallacy that you often hear; you can't build secure software with open source. And I defy you to find an example of a system which would need a higher level of governance and qualification than something that's handling credit card data. And, yet, we see organizations successfully deploying software with things like OpenSolaris and networking stacks that are based on open source software. I've also seen it used in financial services organizations and by a major airline in Europe, which is using open source at the core of their operating system strategy. And they're running their SAP installations on top of an open source operating system framework and saving a million dollars simply by doing that.

So the uses are many and varied, but generally, the goal is to save money. That's where organizations tend to start. And then what tends to happen is the more that they become comfortable with using open source, and the more that they apply it successfully, the more they start to realize that there are benefits other than cost savings that they can take advantage of. And that's when you start to see them turn from open source opportunists into open source advocates. It's interesting to watch that transformation happen over a year or a two-year period at a large company. They start looking for opportunities to replace commercial products, things at the app server level, things at the business intelligence level, things in the web content management space. And all of these are opportunities where there are real, credible, open source projects that are used by large organizations successfully.

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Four short links: 3 June 2009

Video Chat, NGO Incorp, Smart Grid, and Enterprise Sales Funny

1. Tinychat -- very simple web-based take on videochat. Pro members get higher resolution, more rooms, and privacy. (I like the "free = public, charge for private" business model)
3. One Click Orgs -- One Click Orgs is building a website where groups can quickly create a legal structure and get a simple system for group decisions. We think social enterprises, collectives and activist groups have better things to think about than obscure legal clauses. Still getting built, but a good idea. We're one step closer to Charlie Stross's vision from Accelerando of a twisty maze of cross-shareholding organisations whose bylaws are Python scripts.
4. Trilliant Acquisition Signals Next Phase of Smart Grid -- smart grids rely on networked power meters and consuming devices. Therefore there are possible alliances between powerline broadband and smart meter companies, as this union shows. Finally, a use for broadband power? (via monkchips on Twitter)
5. The Vendor-Client Relationship -- should mandatory watching for everyone in enterprise sales. (via johnclegg on Twitter)

You ain't gonna need what?

One of the defining characteristics of the Rails movement has been its willingness to throw out the rules by which software developers and consultants have typically worked. Those rules typically produce big, overblown projects laden with features that no one ever uses--but which sounded good during the project specification phase. Build the simplest thing that could possibly work, and add features from there; say "You ain't gonna need it" when partway into the project, stakeholders come along with strange requirements based on what they think they might want.

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