Open source software is making inroads into corporates as more firms use it to underpin enterprise applications. This means firms need strategies and expertise to manage these developments and benefit their business.
Despite its reputation for cheap, flexible and robust solutions, open source's route to corporate respectability has been a long one, pioneered, in the main, by a number of specialist vendors offering structured support and effectively promising to take the risk out of implementation.
For some time, IT managers who believed in the value of open source had to implement the software behind the backs of board members who were only interested in IT solutions that came with contracts and support desks.
Malcolm Herbert, director of academic business development at open source vendor Red Hat, said 90 percent of UK firms are using open source software somewhere in their IT systems, often unknowingly. 'A lot of senior managers may not realise this, but their technology staff will be using open source code to run core systems such as Web hosting, file services, databases, Internet services and content cacheing services,' he said. He denied this would cause problems for firms if open source experts left Ã, provided that all the work was well-documented.
Eddie Bleasdale, a consultant at e-business specialist Netproject, said IT directors must develop skills to control open source systems. 'They should understand the basics so they can manage the deployment of open source within their organisations,' he said.
Bleasdale said firms must also tap into the open source community to reap the benefits of the technology, but admitted that small firms are unlikely to attract open source experts, who are more likely to work for larger firms or consultancies.
Stacey Quandt of analyst firm Giga said, 'In the past a lot of chief information officers did not understand how operating system software could be supported. As a result, open source was supported by stealth with IT staff opting to use technology such as Apache servers to run applications that were not mission-critical and to gain approval post-implementation.'
Supporters of open source emphasise its adaptability and flexibility. But this flexibility can cause problems if, for example, staff tinker with the kernel. 'The code has to be documented,' said Quandt. 'If staff document what they are doing then it becomes less of an issue. It's not that different from the issues surrounding Windows and Unix.'
Quandt said firms will increasingly need staff with open source skills. 'If you have any kind of open source project, then it's logical to have staff with the relevant skills,' she said.
Quandt said any retraining of existing staff would require careful consideration. 'It can be very challenging to retrain a Windows person to become proficient in open source,' she said. 'You can't just throw them at an open source server and ask them to get on with it. It takes a whole different skills set.'
Herbert added that for many firms the best solution would be to recruit graduates or members of open source communities with expertise in the code. 'Once they have these people there's an awful lot to gain,' he said. 'They can take expertise and software from the open source community and are capable of bringing great innovation.'
