In today's world, everything we do is centered around technology. It is one common factor across any type of business line. Without technology today’s enterprise will not be there tomorrow.
With the growing requirements of technical expertise and the need to innovate, be ahead or stand different, each organization adopts technology in its own form based on their directions and strategies. At the same time, big software or technology firms are investing more and more into research. The community around these innovations is growing and so are custom built solutions to make a differentiating mark.
At the core of technology development is a specific need but more often than not it turns out to cater to much broader spectrum of use-cases. One of the key contributions to the broad use-case scenario has been the open source software development.
Organizations like Google, Microsoft, IBM, Apple are all now coming forward to make a lot more contributions to open source software development. This helps them to tap into the global pool of technology enthusiasts who all come together and contribute towards a common goal - to create something which can help anyone and everyone. The key concepts and ideas are born and brought to a specific shape as envisioned by one of these tech giants but then the code base of the foundation is pushed out in the open for anyone to look at and contribute towards making it more robust and feature rich.
Today if you search for the kind of projects available, they range from a most simple task lists to the most complex enterprise ready ERP solutions. So, if there are so many options available in the wild to download and install, save all the license costs, why do we still go with software for which there are fees to the paid?
The first and foremost important answer is very simple – Support. What if the software breaks and does not perform as intended? What if we need more features or tweak it for some specific requirements? But if the software is open source, can’t the organizations look at the code, adjust it and fine tune it? To upskill an existing team with new software requires time and effort. Organizations do not always have time on their side even if the resources are willing to put in extra efforts. Further, not every organization will hire developers who can work with the open source software. Doing so will increase their cost base but if done carefully it could add a very competitive advantage of being on the forefront of technology.
The topic can be debated for long for both sides of the spectrum where one could argue that going open source will provide a lot of advantages and others would argue that support and time is more paramount. It all depends on the risk appetite of the organization. An organization with a niche business line should explore this frontier to ensure they can get that advantage of being different / providers of bleeding edge technology. More established organizations need to rely on the workforce of technology service providers to ensure that they focus on the business line and how their technology partner can support them being on the front line differentiating them from the others in the same space.
A right mix would be a group level partnership between a technology provider and a service provider where the technology stream of the partnership can focus on possibilities of what the technology can do and how to improve it and the service provider can focus on how to leverage the technology services to benefit their customers.
- 107 views