The Current Enterprise Landscape

The inspiration for this blog comes from my brief time in the industry so far observing the vast amount of organizations who are currently locked into proprietary software solutions and paying millions of dollars in licensing when there is a possibility that they could be getting something of equal value for free.
Is this a real possibility? I'm not to sure yet but this is what I endeavor to discover.

My initial thought on the matter is that companies such as Microsoft and IBM have done much of the hard work in offering prepackaged and tested software suites of which, you pay them for. The most prominent and widely used would be the Microsoft Office Suite, used with Microsoft Exchange Server which only runs on Microsoft Operating Systems for both desktops and servers. In regards to the MS Stack if we look at it from the perceptive of people making the business decisions we might observe the following pros:

1. The MS stack is the industry (almost world) standard.


2. Users are familiar with the MS stack.


3. Their is a large knowledge base available in the form of books, courses websites etc.


4. It's reasonably reliable.


5. Everyone else is using it making it easier to exchange files and information between other organizations.

In the same perspective the pros mentioned above are outweighed by the following cons:

1. The cost of multiple licenses (for large companies this can be in the millions).


2. Tight coupling of software, meaning if you use one then you are forced to use the rest.

Now in recent years many OSS projects have reached a real maturity on a level that according to many open source advocates can rival it's proprietary counterpart as far as features are concerned. I think though there are some issues that go beyond a feature by feature comparison and that these issues relate directly to the proprietary pros list I mentioned earlier and in relation to that the OSS pros address the proprietary cons list. I currently believe that their is a possibility of OSS solutions closing the gap. Some of the issues (correlating directly with the pros above) that need to be addressed in my opinion are:

1. Most organizations are usually very conservative and tend to be like sheep; once someone else does it successfully other will no doubtingly follow.


2. Retraining users who are familiar with the MS stack; this can be done by creating similar user interfaces (UIs).


3. Creating a large knowledge base of OSS solutions.


4. Assuring vendors it's reliable.


5. Making it compatible with the MS stack so that companies who adopt an OSS Enterprise Solution aren't isolated from groups still using the MS stack.

Additional issues are:

• Removing MS Windows operating system dependencies specifically for programs that only run on Windows and have no open source counterpart of an equivalent standard.


• Finding and testing a collection of OSS Solutions that can go together (to match the MS Stack) to be offer as package.


• Raising awareness of such a package.


• A smooth migrating plan to ease the pain of moving from the MS stack.

So basically as someone who is fairly new to the OSS world I'm looking to address these issues as I guess many others are.
Keep your eye on this blog as I dig further into the issues and hopefully come up with a viable solution.