4 reasons companies embrace open source

When developers think of open source, they only associate "free" with nothing else. Because in general, people don't pay much attention to technologies that make them free to use and have little license restrictions.

Now, when companies think of open source, they immediately think of "business agility." In the face of today's rapidly changing market, enterprises pay more and more attention to "business flexibility", and put it in the first place in the development of enterprises.

The use of open source technology to quickly and efficiently develop new applications, while also saving costs, has enabled many large and small businesses to embrace open source technology and continue to apply open source technology to larger projects, the relevant IT industry said.

This is why open source technology is rapidly spreading and popular. Jeffrey Hammond, a Forrester research company focused on application development and delivery, said in a report published by Forrester entitled "Development environment for the year 2013 (Development landscape:2013)," 76% Developers have used open source technology to varying degrees.

Why do many companies, regardless of their size, attach great importance to open source technology? This article summarizes four reasons.

Open source can reduce costs

Saving cost is one of the reasons why enterprises attach importance to open source technology, and also a very important reason. Cost is an important issue for both large and small businesses. How, for example, does Netflix, the US streaming media player, spend at least $8 a month on its services? Hommond explains: "Because all of Netflix's stuff is built on Open-source software, it's just a matter of focusing on the content, Instead of trying to build an operating system or test architecture. ”

"Netflix typically manages its content with Open-source software like Spring, JBoss, or Drupal." Hammond says some companies can use "Lego blocks" for free, so they can devote their time and resources more to what they want to do. In the past, companies often used custom software packages, such as ERP applications, and today, with open source technology, the cost of customizing software has been reduced.

Open source can control cost expenditure

Although many developers and more and more enterprises are optimistic about the development of open source technology recently, but not everyone thinks so.

According to the Forrester survey in the fourth quarter of 2011, developers who never used open source tools, especially open source integration tools, were avoid to open source because of their technical support (which 71% of respondents were concerned about) and the lack of skills to manage open source projects (42% Respondents expressed concern about this). At the same time, respondents were concerned about issues such as security and authorization limits.

In some cases, open source has indeed facilitated the development of application-tailored development. In the past decade, the application of custom development in the market has gradually fallen out of favour, which led to commercial-level applications and software as a service (SaaS) products have been widely used.

The application of custom development can save costs, which attracts the Carestream Tiyatien. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, the United States, is a total assets of about 2.5 billion U.S. dollars in dental, medical imaging systems and health care IT solutions provider, there are 8,000 employees. The company wants to integrate data from the medical devices in the world's factories into a single product lifecycle management application (product Life-cycle Management, PLM) to reduce new product development and production time through effective information management.

"We want to achieve a unified management of product-related information globally," said David G. Sherburne, head of global research and development and it engineering at the Medical Center in the world. "In the future, with the advent of modern platforms, we hope to adopt effective solutions and reduce manual procedures, Increase our productivity by 5%. ”

Therefore, the Aras company was selected by the medical service. Aras is a solution provider based in Andover, Massachusetts, offering a complete range of PLM solutions for global businesses, leveraging an open source model to encourage its users to develop new components and share components with other enterprises. "The performance of the Aras company solution is the best and the price is reasonable," Sherburne said. "But Aras's solution doesn't meet all of our needs, so we need to do some additional application development, and when we're done, We will deploy it to our factories around the world based on a fixed cost point of departure. ”

Since there is no upfront capital permit, this has facilitated the development of sharp-medical care without purchasing and inventory permits. "Software customization mode allows us to access PLM projects, and carry out a reasonable implementation deployment," Sherburne said: "It can provide a fixed cost platform, which can be enhanced over time, can be gradually expanded to allow more collaborative access, while the enterprise does not need to pay additional costs. ”

As expected, the effect of the medical service in the open source application has been the software deployed in its Enterprise Services 1500 users (including 1000 internal users and 500 suppliers), and its price is less than million, with a prepaid cost of $ millions of (which does not include the attendant maintenance costs) In sharp contrast to the application components.

However, big companies are not the only organizations that benefit from the cost component of open source. From an economic standpoint, small businesses that have a need for niche software can get what they need from this inexpensive software component.

Development are child's play's owner Teri Wiss has been looking for a suitable application in recent years that would allow her to easily manage her 16 employees (both full-time and part-time) and use the application to calculate wages for them. Development is child's play is a professional pediatric treatment center in Cupertino, California.

Over the past few years, Wiss has evaluated a wide variety of medical software components, but none of these components can provide the functionality she wants. Wiss says that because of the professionalism and uniqueness of the areas in which it is engaged, few SaaS products or applications can meet her needs, and those that can meet her needs are ridiculously expensive.

Eventually Wiss decided to find a developer focused on open source technology to help her tailor an application that meets her needs, a customized application based on open source technology, whose service price is equivalent to a one-year usage fee for SaaS products that Wiss previously focused on, and when applied for delivery, it's only a one-time payment, There are no additional high costs. "At first I was worried because I didn't know much about it, and I was afraid that developers couldn't understand what I wanted," Wiss said. But then when it comes to cooperation, the developer lets me forget about the work he's going to do, just introduce me to the way I work. "(The details of this case can be read in the figure" open source helps small businesses get out of trouble ")

Open source can improve the quality of software development

People who support open source technology have always believed that better software can be developed through open source technology. They think that in the open source community, if the code is wrong, developers will quickly find the problem and solve it in time. It is often difficult for programmers to discover this problem, at least for a short time.

"Open source technology will give us some benefits, both in terms of reliability and finance." ”

--Peter Richards, general manager of Bank of America's global banking business

Bank of America The advantage of open source technology. "When it comes to high quality software, we have a wide range of options," said Peter Richards, general manager of Bank of America's global banking business. "Open source technology can help us get some benefits, both in terms of reliability and finance." ”

Typically, banks will integrate open source components into custom development applications, but these Open-source components must be authenticated, Richards says. "We will examine each step carefully to ensure that these open source components can be used effectively in the development environment of the bank," he said. ”

Some people are surprised by the use of Open-source technology by companies as big as Bank of America, and Richards quotes Linux as an example of how widely used in the business environment to respond to them. He said: "Initially, companies are also more worried, afraid of Linux is only an amateur development of the operating system, is not professional, I am afraid not competent enterprise environment." However, many years later, those who support Linux make Linux an operating system that can be used well in an enterprise environment. ”

Open source application development code can improve the quality of software because some developers are contributing, checking and testing open source code, which means that the open source code is very reliable. At the same time, the development of the structure is also related to the cost, if you do it, then you may end up paying a large amount of money, because you need to test and check the code. "Providing quality services at a reasonable cost is one of the biggest advantages of open source," Richards said. ”

Open source to promote business agility

Do not confuse business agility with the concept of agile development, which refers to the ability of an enterprise to respond quickly to market demands. By speeding up the pace of software development, open source not only gives developers agility, but also gives business agility.

Ron Pitt is a developer collaborating with Development's child's play owner Wiss, and is also a software advisor for Levelhead FX Company, located in the state of Bochum, California. If Ron Pitt needs new code to do this project, he can just take a few minutes to download it directly from the open source community without having to recreate it himself. "Of course, some of the code has holes in it, but I'd rather spend 15 minutes fixing these vulnerabilities and not going to spend 15 hours writing a code," Pitt said. ”

Companies also benefit from the functionality provided by open source technology, allowing them to react quickly to the market. It is worth mentioning that those who use Open-source software code do not need to follow the vendor to give you a deadline for their business application upgrades. "If you wait for a supplier to help you upgrade, it will affect your company's innovation and production speed," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse in Ottawa, Canada. Eclipse was originally developed by IBM as the next generation IDE development environment for Java, the alternative commercial software visual age.

Madhu Nutakki, vice president of Kaiser Permanente, also believes that open source can bring value to businesses in terms of agility, and Kaiser Permanente is a medical service in the California of the western city of Oakland, USA.

"Open source technology facilitates our faster and more frequent release of updates." ”

Madhu Nutakki, vice president of--kaiser Permanente Company

Since 2011, Kaiser Permanente Company has been using GitHub source code to control the company's internal system. "GitHub was created by developers to release the code as quickly as possible," Nutakki said. It facilitates our faster and more frequent release of updates. "At the same time, GitHub can also use proprietary development tools, the Kaiser Permanente company mainly use it to do open source deployment."

Nutakki explains: "We use GitHub primarily because our programming paradigm requires a faster release pattern." "Kaiser Permanente has aggressively moved into the mobile sector, which means the company will face some customers who have higher expectations for frequent updates." "We used to create a big application on average every six months, and over the past two years we've been reducing the release cycle to quarterly, monthly, or even faster." Using GitHub we can create an application in just one hours, and it takes a long time to use other products. ”

Hammond, a Forrester analyst, also believes that the advantage of open source technology agility is its ability to quickly gain popularity in enterprise IT deployments. "If you ask a developer how to do a special project, they'll tell you they're not going to buy any hardware, because they can run the project on Linux." They can leverage an open-source development architecture and help anyone develop the apps they want. ”

Open source also brings a lot of "resilience" to new resources generated during the software development process. "You don't have to worry about ' I have permission ', ' I'm going to buy more software, '" Hammond said. "This is why cloud-based software and open source software are highly correlated," he says, which provides the enterprise with unprecedented scalability and flexibility.

Open source can mitigate business risks

Another benefit of leveraging open source technology, which may often be overlooked, is to reduce business risk by reducing the reliance on individual or multiple vendors. Milinkovich points out that developers can immediately stop the work they do on topcased when topcased, an embedded system development tool, is acquired. Companies that have used and favored the tool, such as Aibus (Airbus, a European civil aircraft manufacturing Company), have restructured it and looked for other developers to continue to support the tool.

Suppliers are constantly changing, and the business class has changed, and the only thing that remains unchanged is the open source community. "The openness and transparency of open source technology has eased many risks," Milinkovich said. As long as it is profitable, or if you continue to access source code and repository, it will not give up the development code, whether the enterprise is large or small. If you can have a vibrant code community based on your own, it will be more resilient than any rigid enterprise. ”

Gerald Pfeiffer, the product director of SuSE Company in Nuremberg, Germany, believes that it is for these reasons that open source technology will flourish, SuSE primarily offering an enterprise-class distribution of Linux operating systems.

People use open source technology to save costs and gain benefits, but this is not the biggest advantage of open source. Open source also provides functionality to avoid locking and customization, which is a collection of all these features. Pfeiffer said: "You and others share the cost of development, so in the open source community, you can get a greater diversity and independence than the provider gives you." "(Wang Ne compiled)