Open Source is Inevitable

So far, many partners have been reluctant in acquiring expertise in open source solutions and service. However, as it gains momentum, it will be imperative for partners to build an open source practice

By Amit Singh

Over the past decade, open source software (OSS) has moved from being unstable yet cutting-edge source code that only geeks used to be a robust business proposition which SMBs, as well as Fortune 500 enterprises, have adopted. Along with the steady rise in its usage, businesses and organizations across verticals today are more certain to run mission-critical applications on open source platform than in the past.

In fact, Indian Railways, IRCTC and Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) are among the long list of organizations that are leveraging open source technology. Besides, other large private companies like Essar, TataSky and Mahindra Finance too are running business-critical applications and functions on open source.

“The BSE is built end-to-end on open source on Red Hat. The Indian Railways uses open source for managing the IRCTC portal which they re-architected using Red Hat components. We also serve customers in banks, e-commerce and other sectors like oil and gas and telecom. Even the UIDAI—Aadhaar project—is built end-to-end on Red Hat,” informs Rajesh Rege, Managing Director, Red Hat India.

On CXOs’ priority

Today, the creation and use of open source have undergone an enormous transformation. Simply stated, software innovation has decisively shifted to open source. “It’s difficult to think of a single software segment that has a proprietary packaged software vendor defining and leading the field. The power of participation and collaboration of open source is no longer just an IT initiative but has become a top business priority for many enterprises,” states L Ashok, Managing Director, Futurenet Technologies.

According to a recent study conducted by Red Hat with market research firm Forrester Consulting, 51 percent of the respondents reported that their organizations have implemented open source solution while 49 percent of respondents plan to expand/implement open source solutions within the next 12 months.

Further, 86 percent of survey respondents highlighted reducing cost/improving efficiency as one of their key business initiatives within the next 12 months. The study surveyed 455 CIOs and senior IT decision makers from nine countries in the Asia Pacific.

“While proprietary software is abundant and is an established way of running and using technology, a lot of people today consciously choose not to use it because they are aware of its limitations. Users are more aware of the dangers of using proprietary software and concerns with regards to their freedom to use, fix, modify, control and manage the software and their rights to privacy,” explains Abhas Abhinav, Founder, and Hacker-in-Charge, DeepRoot Linux.

Regarding the benefits of enterprise open source use, there are three primary outcomes that open source makes possible:

First, open source levels the playing field. In the past, larger and better-funded enterprise IT groups carried a significant advantage versus smaller enterprises, due to larger budgets and better relationships with innovation-providing vendors.

Second, open source use makes it possible for every enterprise to gain quick access to innovation. With open source, organizations of any size have immediate access to leading-edge developments in software.

Finally, and vastly underappreciated, is how open source allows organizations to redirect their budget from undifferentiated infrastructure technology to new initiatives. It’s no secret that CIOs are under enormous pressure to deliver new business offerings faster. That’s hard when most of your software budget is tied up in ongoing license fees. Leveraging open source can take money out of existing systems and direct it toward applications that have more business impact.

“Enterprises in India are going global, and in a fiercely competitive environment, organizations look for tremendous cost-effectiveness, as well as flexibility and reliability as the key deciding factors when it comes to technology adoption. Open source is the perfect choice to help enterprises overcome all such hurdles,” bolsters Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, Country Head, SUSE India.

Moving beyond cost argument

Open source today is the primary engine for innovation and business transformation. Cost is probably the last reason for an organization to go in for open source.

According to a market study by North Bridge and Black Duck, about 90 percent of surveyed organizations said that open source improves efficiency, interoperability, and innovation. What is even more significant is the finding that the adoption of open source for production environments outpaced the proprietary software for the first time – more than 55 percent leverage OSS for production infrastructure.

As compelling as it is, the move to open source is being driven by far more than just the cost argument. The biggest driver today is a growing recognition of the benefits around innovation, freedom and real ownership.

“The core value of using free and open source software (FOSS) is the control, privacy, and opportunity it provides. The costs savings are a side-effect. In fact, focusing on the cost is the wrong way to explain the value of FOSS because it is very easy for vendors to offer any proprietary software free-of-charge but not providing you freedom with it,” reveals Abhinav of DeepRoot Linux.

While the opportunities with the open source have remained the same, the acceptability of the open source has gone up tremendously based on the merits beyond just cost. “Many customers are actually coming back and are willing to bet on OSS rather than a proprietary one as they don’t want to be locked-in with a single vendor. Few years back, it was rather a concept selling which took weeks to materialize. Now, the customers are aware of the benefits and readily opt for open source solutions. That’s a big change,” shares Ramdas S, CEO, Netzary Infodynamics.

OpenStack will rule the cloud

OpenStack has already made its presence felt as an enterprise-class framework for the cloud. An independent study, commissioned by SUSE, reveals that 81 percent of senior IT professionals are planning to move or are already moving to OpenStack private cloud. In fact, the most innovative businesses and many Fortune 100 businesses have already adopted OpenStack for their production environment.

OpenStack has gained the upper hand with its flexibility, agility, performance, and efficiency. Significant cost reduction is another major consideration for organizations, especially the large enterprises. Because a proprietary cloud platform is excessively expensive to build and maintain.

At the same time, an OpenStack-based architecture supports the kind of innovations that enterprises are striving to achieve, as it offers self-service developer access.

“Hundreds of companies already use OpenStack to control their compute, storage and networking resources and its friendliness with heterogeneous infrastructure make it an ideal solution for organizations who do not want to be tied to a single cloud solution. In fact, OpenStack today has the biggest number of contributors after the core Linux operating system,” details Manojkummar Garg, CEO, Taashee Linux Services.

According to many, if we compare OpenStack with VMware or Nutanix cloud stack, Nutanix may arguably stand out as a feature-rich product. While OpenStack will have all the required features, but getting OpenStack up and running requires a lot of effort and expertise. “Proprietary solutions do require efforts and expertise but they are backed by vendor support and guarantee. However, I bet that any good partner will provide better support and expertise on an open source solution if customers could spend roughly about 30-40 percent of the license value cost of the proprietary software on the open source solution,” shares Ramdas of Netzary.

Besides OpenStack, there are many robust and mature open source cloud solutions including CloudStack, Eucalyptus, Synnefo, openQRM, OpenShift and Cloud Foundry.

Further, in a cloud project, implementation cost will be over 50-55 percent lesser with open source solution as licensing cost is not involved. The operational cost will be similar or maybe 15 percent lesser than a regular proprietary solution. Hence, benefits are multi-fold, asserts Ashok of Futurenet.

“In the cloud economy, businesses are always searching for innovative ways to increase their developer velocity and agility, to accelerate digital transformation. They are relying on open, cloud-neutral, and community-driven container-native software stacks that enable them to avoid cloud lock-in and to run in a true hybrid mode – so they can use the same stack in the cloud – for that matter on any cloud – as they run on-premises,” adds Ravi Pinto, Director, Product Management, Oracle Cloud Platform.

OSS drives Big Data

It’s no secret that Hadoop and Apache Spark are the hottest technologies in Big Data. In fact, the Big Data space has been taken over by a slew of open source solutions including TensorFlow, Cassandra, MongoDB, and Pandas. One can execute a data analysis or data science project without actually spending a penny on software licenses.

With the significant technical advances in open source database technology, there is a tremendous movement underway. One of the biggest trends in the database is the NoSQL movement, which is a radical shift providing a mechanism for storage and data retrieval that is modeled on means other than the tabular relations used in relational databases.

“NoSQL is clearly the future, and a solution provider who invests in the platform will be able to solve customers’ Big Data problems and will grow faster than others,” says Garg of Taashee.

As evident by a Gartner study, 70 percent of all newly deployed applications will run on an open source database by 2018. The main reason to switch is the considerably lower TCO.

Not only this, 50 percent of all existing commercial RDBMS (relational database management systems) will convert to an open source database (OSDBMS). The open source approach, Gartner says, has entered a state of full market productivity.

In fact, the adoption by companies of all sizes is a direct reflection of the maturity of the open source solutions. Gartner also confirms that the overall TCO of a company’s database will drop drastically when using open source. It calculated that companies can literally save up to 80 percent of upfront and ongoing costs.

Storage gets OSS push

The open source is specifically playing a large role in the software-defined-storage (SDS) space. It is helping organizations in overcoming the current challenges associated with SDS. Open SDS solutions can scale infinitely without a need to refresh the entire platform or disrupt the existing functioning environment.

Specifically, there are three main open-source SDS contenders. On the cloud side, there’s OpenStack with Cinder and Swift. Apart from OpenStack’s approaches, there are Ceph and GlusterFS.

In addition, open source storage has caught up, with, for example, open source file systems that have become the default for high-performance computing (HPC) and in other mainstream applications too.

Others are network file systems, such as Red Hat’s GlusterFS, and then there is the Sun/Oracle-derived file system and volume manager ZFS, which is widely implemented and underpins many other open source projects.

In addition, open source storage has made inroads into object storage with Ceph (also Red Hat-owned) and OpenStack Swift, as well as in Big Data and analytics, where Apache’s HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) is considered a leader.

Bit of challenges

Solution providers identify staff skills and talent acquisition as a major challenge. Simply put, open source requires a higher level of technical talent than traditional proprietary solutions. “The foremost challenge we see in the open source domain is to acquire and retain talent. In fact, being a highly specialized area, open source development engineers are over 25 percent more expensive than their counterparts specialized on proprietary software,” shares Ashok of Futurenet.

While proprietary solutions may entail capital investment in excess of $100,000 for licenses, the open source solution will straight away save any kind of licensing costs. Hence, there is definite value with open source; however, still many people prefer proprietary solutions due to vendor guarantee on the solution to work optimally. On the other hand, partner implementing the open source has limited face value while offering the same guarantee on the open source solution.

“Selling solutions on OpenStack might be tougher as the customer may already have spent a large amount on existing hardware and would readily spend Rs 10-15 lakh more to get the best outcome. They may not realize the fact that there is not much difference between a good Nutanix implementation and a good OpenStack implementation,” highlights Ramdas of Netzary.

Open source to be at the core of transformation

Digital transformation is, in fact, one of the biggest headaches for CIOs because of its sheer heterogeneous and all-pervading nature. With the data at the center of digital transformation, it is often impossible for CIOs to ensure that the information that percolates down is insightful and secure at the same time. They need a platform which is scalable, flexible, allows innovations and is quick enough to turn around. This is exactly what open source promises. Not just that, with the current heterogeneous environments that exist in enterprises, interoperability is going to be the most critical factor.

Technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) will make data more valuable and voluminous. The diversity of devices and standards that will emerge will make open source a great fit for enterprises to truly leverage these trends. It is surprising to know that almost all ‘digital enterprises’ in the world are already using open source platforms and tools to a great extent. The pace of innovation that open source communities can bring to the table is unprecedented.

A recent research paper from IDC states that 85 percent of the surveyed enterprises globally consider open source to be the realistic or preferred solution for migrating to software-defined infrastructure (SDI). IDC also recommends to avoiding vendor lock-in by deploying open source solutions. Interestingly, many organizations seem to have already understood the benefits of open source clearly, with Linux adoption in the data centers growing steadily at a pace of 15-20 percent.