Asoke K. Laha
President & MD
Interra IT
There was a time when proprietary software used to hold the market in awe. Days are changing along with technologies of all hues and kinds. The market is adapting itself to the mode of more openness and competition. There is increasing attention towards specialized, complete targeted solutions and of course towards open source technology.
A recent report states that India and Brazil have the best record of OSS (Open Source Software adoption and development. India is at the forefront of OSS development in Asia along with countries such as China, Japan and South Korea. Most of the OSS development firms in India work on the projects of the European and American companies.
With open source software and advancements in virtualized architectures, organizations gain the freedom to choose what applications and infrastructure software they want to evaluate (at no cost), which of these solutions to deploy and how to pay for that deployment -on-site licences, hosted solutions, or Software as a Service (SaaS). Open source applications are now available for all common types of enterprise software - from databases, application servers and Web servers, to Web browsers and office applications, to network monitoring software and security software. The code base is stable, increasing the reliability of the software.
The Government of India has taken progressive policy measures in the field of e-governance by formulating a policy that mandates the use of Free and Open Source Software in all public projects. With a huge spending on e-governance currently going on and more on the anvil, it will certainly boost India's OSS record. The Kerala Government, as well as other states like Tamil Nadu, has already actively promoted implementation of FOSS in the education and e-governance domains.
At InterraIT, we have our own Open Source Engineering Practice, that offers / sources solutions and services in consulting, designing / architecture and development of solutions on Java, LAMP stack, business intelligence and other open source tools, migration to and from open source tools to other tools, integration of open source tools with third-party product(s) and tools.
In the current year, if Open Source Software is adopted, it can save India more than $2 billion and antivirus costs can be totally avoided.
For instance, based on the projected sales of personal computers (desktops and notebooks), a study by IIM indicates that even if 50% desktops are fitted with a FOSS operating system, the savings will be Rs.985 crore; and if 70 per cent have FOSS, the savings will rise to around Rs.1,380 crore.
The Life Corporation of India, with an IT infrastructure of 3,500 servers and 30,000
desktops, saved about Rs.42 crore by adopting FOSS. The IT@School project of Kerala replaced Windows software with FOSS on 50,000 desktops in schools across the State. Cost savings amounted to Rs.49 crore.
There is a great opportunity in the SMB segment where a bundled set of applications built on content management systems, ecommerce, accounting, and web-based ERP and CRM systems can solve most of the needs of SMB owners.
Since the cost of adoption is a big factor for the SMBs, the open source software can definitely help SMB organizations in reaping benefits by using advanced IT systems.
Any software company interested in future growth has to cope with OSS in order to get ahead in the marketplace.
