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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.
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OpenGOO kicks the crap out of SugarCRM when it comes to useability. I was ableto switch an entire office over to it with a crapload of buy-in by the secretaries and other non techie users simply because of how easy it is to use.
http://opengoo.org/
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's what the TFA says.
Strangely they include stuff like vBulletin, which, while open source software, is not free software. Neither beer nor speech.
I wonder how anything with a non-zero pricetag can be more cost-effective than something that costs nothing.
They should have mentioned phpBB instead of vBulletin.
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Why only MySQL? PostgreSQL is a big competitor.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
I wish someone had told me that sooner.
I was led to believe I had to install Linux *first* before I could use OpenOffice. Now that makes me wonder what other free alternatives exist for common applications - like PowerPoint. Why waste money buying expensive software when I can just use zero-cost alternatives?
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Uhhh, a lot of the solutions mentioned in TFA are not open source, but they are cheaper than their more expensive competition. i.e. Basecamp, dimdim, etc. are not open source..
OTOH, SugarCRM, asterisk, open office are open source, free in both senses.
Anyway, an interesting list...
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
If you're looking to back up Unix, Mac, and Windows systems, then check out Bacula:
http://www.bacula.org/en/
I've got this running on 7 systems at work. Some use tapes, while others back up to a RAID array. It is fast, stable, and robust. It does not rely on Samba, NFS, or any other services. It has its own file and storage daemons. It will also do VSS backups of Windows clients, allowing open files to be backed up.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
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.
Amanda has support for 'virtual tapes' -- files that hold your backups. You can then burn these virtual tapes to DVD or BD later.
My blog
I don't know about now...but I used to monitor bugtraq and it scared me into never, EVER using phpBB.
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Take a look at Zimbra. They have a free version and a licensed (read: supported) version, and because the client is written in AJAX it'll work in most every modern browser. They also have connectors for Outlook and Evolution, and I think Thunderbird, if you'd rather not use a web client.
Zimbra is so good, I'm shocked it wasn't on his list. The one caveat is it's owned by Yahoo!, so if they either go away (doesn't seem likely) or do get bought out by Microsoft (also doesn't seem likely at this time), the support for it may disappear. But then, it's open source, it'll never really die, will it?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
OpenOffice instead of MS Office
7-zip instead of WinZip
Alfresco for document management and workflow
Zimbra (or Google Apps) instead of Exchange
Firefox instead of IE (yeah, you'll save money by not having to remove all the magically installing spyware)
MySQL or PostgreSQL instead of MSSQL (come on people, open source is about choice - use whatever open source dbms you want and quit fussing!)
xTuple instead of Quickbooks (great enterprise-class accounting/sales/CRM/inventory software that can truly rival the "polished quality" of Quickbooks with pretty much the same features)
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?
It is a very well written troll.
FTFY.
Visit jerryleecooper .com (link busted on purpose) for more trolls in the same vein. Looks like astroturf.
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?
I am hoping someone can suggest a replacement for "Hello World" which, according to our engineers, is a critical application for our enterprise.
Sincerely,
PHB
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Yeah, but none of those are very important. If a transaction fails when you're updating your Facebook profile, nobody gives a shit. I mean look at what happened to Slashdot when it got 24 million posts.
I would bet money that none of those companies use MySQL for their paycheck processing software.
I don't dislike MySQL, but I wouldn't consider it an "enterprise RDBMS".
Maybe not
When they say the MySQL will not scale like Oracle they are mostly right. The exceptions where MySQL works are when you design a application around MySQL and use just one installation of MySQL per application. When you do this and it works what you are really doing is using mySQL is a fancy kind of file system.
With Oracle you can build an enterprise database that holds _everything_ and all you applications can access the same database. There are some great advantages when you do this
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We just did an evaluation of tools like Nagios, Munin, Zenoss & Zabbix and chose Zabbix. It's a little more effort to get going than Zenoss: compile from sources for the free version create your own account, move the files around yourself, etc than Zenoss (RPM install). But once going you're instantly more productive. Zenoss touts their strength as an agentless solution, but in practice I found that I didn't get a single system out of an initial scan of 50 PCs that picked up all the information is was supposed to get, or didn't give me a splat of SNMP errors to boot. Plus you have to block out a day to learn the Zenoss language of zenThis, zenThat, zenTheOther to even begin to understand the product and work out what you want to capture.
Zabbix by comparison was a loads easier. Edit the client conf file to point back to your server then copy the client agent conf file to the target, and the agent binary, following their instructions (create an account for it on Linux) start it, and you're done on the client side. From the server, login to the web page and follow the instructions for adding a new client and linking it to the appropriate system template. Instantly it starts collecting data and (after a period of time) you can view what it's collecting in graph form. The graphs have a nice zoom feature too: just click, drag and release on the bit you want to expand. I'm not even beginning to do this tool justice, it can do so much more than this. Go see their web site.
Zenoss looks a bit prettier, but Zabbix blew them away on ease of use once it was up and running. Oh, and Zabbix can do agent-less too using SNMP templates for things like network switches, if that's the way you want to go. Oh (again) be aware that if you have a mix 32bit and 64 of Linux builds (as we do) that you compile the agent binary for the box you're putting it on. They provide pre-built win32 and win64 agents for you.
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Typically, the Slashdot summary gets it wrong. The article is called "The 25 Best Alternatives To Your Enterprise Applications & Functions" and describes the list as "some of the most cost effective applications on the market that can easily replace some of your more expensive Enterprise solutions and functions." However, the article confusingly has an Open Source logo prominently displayed and doesn't very well distinguish between Open Source, free of cost, and low cost alternatives.
You're pretty much on your own on these 2 things when it comes to so called "free" software, and the TCO ends up being more expensive than a paid application.
That is not true generally, although it can be if you really go out of your way to implement something badly.
It's a MS talking point and it conveniently overlooks that most of the time with proprietary software you're paying for a steep license fee AND pay for support or a support contract separately. We use majority OSS here and the TCO blows away proprietary alternatives.
If we need support on an OSS choice we choose to purchase it, so far we haven't needed any. The other bogus argument frequently raised is that there's a productivity hit on time you spend researching solutions for OSS issues. That's another one that never happens in reality and also ignores the hours proprietary admins spend pouring over knowledge base searches.
Most for profit companies are squeezing their workforce so hard for profits these days that service in many companies is worse than what you get from OSS.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I keep hearing about 'alternatives to enterprise software' and invariably the same mistake pops up over and over: Alternatives to enterprise software are non-enterprise software!
Seems pretty obvious, right? Let's look at what is commonly meant by "enterprise," at least by those who live in that world.
I want software that has been thoroughly documented, tested, and proven. It NEEDS a decently long track record! It NEEDS a formal support mechanism behind it.
If I buy something like backup software (with a support contract of course), The vendor has to be able to tell me, "It will work _this_ way." Not "it should..." or "we thought it would..." But hey, bugs happen, right? When I discover a bug that affects my enterprise, I have to be able to go to the vendor and say "fix this" and have it done. When something breaks in the middle of the night, I need to be able to get definitive technical support within a pre-specified time frame.
Enterprise software is only marginally about the compiled code you get on a CD. It's primarily about support, robustness, and guarantees of quality. It's about strict patch release management, and conservative changes.
If you want to run (say) Amanda instead of NetBackup, that's fine--it's a decent piece of software as far as I've seen; but understand that by itself it's not an enterprise tool. The support mechanism around it is what makes it enterprise software (or not).
It's a simple cost analysis--how much will your company lose if software "x" dies, and how much of an increased risk is there in using freeware vs. buying a commercial product from a given vendor?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban