The Benefits of 'Vendor-Free' Open Source IT

mjasay writes "IDC has released a report looking into industry adoption of open software. In the study, analyst Matt Lawton stumbles across an intriguing trend: IT departments do most of the services around open source, rather than third-party consulting companies. While IDC believes this is a bad thing, the data in the report suggests otherwise. 70% of the enterprises surveyed did their own implementations, while roughly 90% supported their own open-source deployments. This might be a cause for alarm if the projects weren't so successful: 70% of the projects were deemed to be of "Critical" or "High Importance" compared to other IT projects and 90% plan to maintain or increase their investment in open source projects. Could it be that open source is liberating enterprises from an unhealthy dependence on vendors, and that early results suggest that this will be a Very Good Thing for the success of IT projects, many of which have failed historically."

Comments

Good news for those going into IT

[neapolitan]

Very interesting thesis of this post. In my line of work (health care) there is a lot of in-house development of patient care record systems, as there is not a dominant standard at this time.

I've found the following:

  - You get smarter, more resourceful people when they are not MSCE drones, but actually programmers that are able to solve a problem, not just relay it up the chain or find the checkbox in the configuration GUI.

  - There is much less waste in a way, and more in another way. Specifically, implementing a solution often involves talking to a single person about a problem with the database, not finding the "Oracle consultant guy" who then can talk to the "Microsoft guy." With a department that has its own development, these things seem to go faster and there is less separation of functions.

  - However, many hospitals / organizations duplicate functionality, which is the "more waste" that I talk about. I mean, many, many businesses are the same and need email / web server setups plus a few business-specific apps. This is all duplicated by each organization. Training a consultant is even more globally efficient in this regard, who can take his expertise and start multiple implementations without (expensive) retraining.

Overall, I think this is great news for smart people going into IT. You will be sought after to lead a company department, and all of those license fees can now contribute to your salary + additional savings for the company. Would you rather earn $x from being a MSCE admin, or $5x managing a vertical open-source system with much more intellectual stimulation? I'd take the latter.

It's about relative risk.

[mawhin]

Where I work, it seems to come down to

(a) Spend several ten of thousands upfront and the another few thousand every year on a commercial product. Never have it integrate like they promised it would. Wait weeks or forever for fixes. Repeat every three years. Or..

(b) Buy a couple of servers. Spend time I would otherwise have spent trying not to fall asleep putting together what we need by gluing together a few open source systems. Fix it when it breaks. Maybe it takes a few weeks. But we always get there in the end.

I'd be much happier paying good money for commercial 'solutions' if they weren't pretty much always rubbish. And by rubbish I mean plaintext auth over http, I mean wasting a week whilst vendors argue over whose problem it is - without actually investigating, etc etc.

If want less-than-perfect products with substandard support, I can do that myself.