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Best Open Source Alternatives To Enterprise Apps
PeekAB00 writes "With 2009 IT budgets getting chopped down John Perez came up with this list of 25 best alternatives to enterprise applications (e.g DimDim over Webex, SugarCRM instead of Seibel, Zenoss over HP OpenView). John's list is somewhat eclectic. I am curious to hear what other enterprise (let's be frank ... expensive) apps I can replace this year with open source ones. I am particularly interested in back-up and email archiving suggestions."
Whatever you've got, consider replacing it with Sphinx, which is awesome. I'm using it with Rails and the Ultrasphinx plugin and it's been great - doing excerpts (for example, notice the highlighted results from a search for 'combat') - was a piece of cake.
The Army reading list
I don't see any FPGA development suites listed on Mr. Perez's homepage. At $10,000 per package I guess that's not something programmers are willing to just give away.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
We are migrating a whole bunch of sites away from eRoom because it's so expensive. (I didn't know it was open source, but the guy who brought it into our enterprise is a huge proponent of open source. He has rapidly lost interest in it over the past 12 months, mainly because it was a headache to administer and an embarrassment in a business sense because of the costs.)
Open source or not, I don't particularly care; I'm interested in doing the best thing for the business. In this case, eRoom is so expensive as to be unjustifiable, and we're realizing substantial cost savings by migrating to a closed source solution.
Bottom line: eRoom may (or may not) be a good technical solution, but I'm amused by seeing it in an article about using open source alternatives to save money.
Seems like it was a stretch. Community and forum software as "enterprise"? Uh, no. I desperately need an open source alternative to Exchange/Outlook and point of sale software for my business.
I've often wondered if Glassfish app server and OpenMQ messaging are viable alternatives (in realibility, performance and features) to IBM's Websphere and Websphere MQ. That would save a bunch of money right there, but it's got to be a huge battle switching an existing IBM system (and add-ons to that system) over to the open source alternatives.
Interesting. Tell that to Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Google, Nokia and YouTube. Or, how about Slashdot and Digg - capable of bringing down moderately sized web sites with the click of a million mice?
Check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL
http://www.mysql.com/customers/customer.php?id=281
http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/generate-article.php?type=ss&id=slashdot
Just as a single example, what kind of scalability do most people need beyond Facebook and Wikipedia. I work for a very large internet company that has standardized on Oracle, and we have several well-paid DBAs who spend all day monitoring and tweaking our database servers. My previous job was a different large company that used MySQL as a back end for a very similar infrastructure (Java EE, Spring, Hibernate, Clustered in a similar way) with not a single full-time DBA (the helpdesk manager was the only real DBA other than the deployment engineers).
Now, I'm not a professional DBA. I'm just a programmer, but I was one of the maintainers of the MySQL server (I don't get to touch the Oracle servers here except on my local developers instance). I can tell you from personal experience that MySQL is easier to maintain and administer, faster to start up, and requires far fewer system resources to keep going. Judging by just the performance of Wikipedia and Facebook, it seems to perform quite well under heavy load. So, please tell me what basis you have to place MySQL out of the elite top-tier of database servers?
Try xTuple.... Has a lot of the same user-friendliness as Quickbooks - but doesn't lack features like some other accounting/sales/CRM/inventory systems.
It's enterprise-class and you can buy support from the vendor.
Does any one know of a good alternative to Microsoft Project? I am working on a small (academic) practicum project with a constraint that no money is to be spent on acquiring software. I tried OpenProject but that seems to have quite a few rough edges. Any other alternatives?
Can everyone please give their opinion of Bacula vs Amanda? (The only thing that looks good TO ME about BackupPC is it's data de-duplication) Currently I'm using Retrospect, and it gets the job done, but has flaws and I'm not ready to pay the upgrade price (we originally got a free license) I'm a VERY mixed environment, we have: Win2k3 w/exchange Win2k3 for file/print Centos for: MySQL Apache Pen/VRRP load balancing MailScanner virus/spam gateway Vmware Server (all hosts are linux, guests are mixed) Vmware ESXi Right now retrospect does a good job on all of it except MySQL. Well, except for the fact that it recently lost a backup set at the same time the server hosting the files died, loosing 20GB of data :/
I have another handwritten backup script that rsyncs the most crucial data to exavault.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Does anyone here have any experience with and/or recommendations for any open source finincial software suitable for running a small (but growing!) services company?
We are currently running on QuickBooks, but we are finding it extremely limiting.
Thanks!
AC
Off to a good start. So, what is an enterprise? Merriam Webster thinks that it is one of the following:
So, apparently, Enterprise Software can be software that helps one recite the alphabet backwards while drunk (difficult), pick random sex partners (risky), walk up to Mike Tyson to insult him (daring), or helps, for example, my little cousin run her lemonade stand (economic activity).
"We are migrating a whole bunch of sites away from eRoom because it's so expensive .. [and an embarrassment in a business sense because of the costs]
.. but the guy who brought it into our enterprise is a huge proponent of open source"
Expensive, how so, licenses, maintenance, down time, explain Spock ?
[we're realizing substantial cost savings by migrating to a closed source solution.]"
What 'closed source solution did your company choose, who did the choosing, how is this solution saving your costs?
"I didn't know it was open source
This is curiously contradictory, while he was enthusing on 'open source' did he neglect to mention that eRoom was so expensive? Did you even ask about the license, even when the splash screen came up?
"He has rapidly lost interest in it over the past 12 months, mainly because it was a headache to administer"
What's he being doing over the past twelve months to earn his salary. Does he stil lwork there? How did you company manage preceding your migration to the 'commercial' solution. What is it about these 'open source fanbois', don't they have any business discipline?
What was it doing that caused the excessive administration. Generally, from what I've seen, and I've been in the business for over fifteen years, once a system is up and running, and baring hardware failure, it requires minimal administration, a bunch of scripts does it all.
"I'm amused by seeing it in an article about using open source alternatives to save money"
I'm amazed that Ford Motor Company seems to be able to get it working. What business are you in again ?
davecb5620@gmail.com
I may be biased, but I think Postgresql is *easier* to use than MySQL. Thanks to PgAdminIII even newbies can do a fine job of managing a rock-solid RDBMS.
The alternative explanation of swordgeek's definition of "Enterprise" software (Star Trek jokes aside) is that, according to his definition, there is currently no enterprise software available anywhere, from anyone, nor has there ever been any.
I'm willing to accept that as a reasonable answer.