With a low capital investment or commitment, zero in many cases, a wide selection to choose from and a large community offering free updates and solutions, it’s no wonder that open source applications are spurring a huge following in this economic slump.

With a low capital investment or commitment, zero in many cases, a wide selection to choose from and a large community offering free updates and solutions, it’s no wonder that open source applications are spurring a huge following in this economic slump.

Imagine saving $1,500 on your next accounting software purchase or the same amount on your next enterprise system application.  These visions are becoming a reality and are the driver of the demand for open source solutions over the past 5 years. 

In this economic environment, companies are scrambling to cut costs while increasing or at least maintaining revenues at the same time.  The answer for many business whether it be accounting software, sales and marketing software, data warehousing, or collaboration software may be with software on demand (SOD), software as a solution (SaaS) applications or other enterprise software solutions that are hosted online.

Open source solutions previously called ASP, application service provider, applications, have been around for over a decade, but only until recently, over the last 5 years have they been taken seriously by consumers and the traditional “big” enterprise solutions that historically have dominated the market such as IBM, SAP and Oracle.

Open source advantages, as we have touched on, allow companies to use powerful enterprise solutions without the high capital commitments increasing demand for enterprise applications and user adoption.  Companies are also able to get the most up to date technologies and compatibility with other emerging technologies as the open source development community updates and innovates current open source applications.  The latest upgrades can be easily integrated into open source applications allowing companies to bypass costly implementation consulting resources as well as business interruption down time.  Because of this collaborative approach with open source developers, new, powerful features are updated and upgraded at a much faster rate than traditional off the shelf software applications. Developers, on the whole, are more interested in innovation and improved functionality than money.

However, this community development forum, can and has led to products that are not up to standards as on the shelf solutions, or even up to the same caliber as other open source solutions on the market.  Companies considering using open source applications need to weigh the longevity, track record, and user base of open source solutions before diving head first into an open source application just to save costs. In this situation, it may be worth while spending the $1,500 for an accounting software solution that is on-premise, or off the shelf rather than implement a shoddy solution in your organization.

Clearly, choosing the right enterprise system whether its open source or a on premise solution, the pros and cons of cost savings, features and support must be weighed. But cost savings is a key influencer in todays market and the flexibility of switching out an open source solution with little pain involved are making them pretty formidable solutions to beat.

Written by :

rich