Potential Areas for Adoption
Areas in an enterprise that can immediately benefit from open source technologies
OpenCrowd has done an extensive analysis of the open source software portfolio and identified open source products that we believe are ready for adoption into the enterprise. Enterprises should look into the following areas and consider using open source technologies and software development best practices from the open source community:
Web infrastructure and applications
Enterprises that are looking to reduce the cost of their web infrastructure and application development should look at open source alternatives that are high quality, low cost replacements and to use more off-the-shelf application components versus building your own. Every aspect of web infrastructure including the web server, application server, database, content management, LDAP, etc has an open source alternative that is well suited for enterprise usage. Open source application frameworks and components can be found for most common, non-proprietary functionality in applications. The LAMP stack running on commodity hardware is one of the most commonly mentioned open source success stories, but that there are many other opportunities to leverage open source for web infrastructure and applications.
See how OpenCrowd's experience in open source technologies can help you reduce the cost of your web infrastructure.
Upgrade legacy systems
Systems built on proprietary technologies that are due for an upgrade are an ideal candidate for migration to an open source technologies-based platform. The ease of customization and access of open source products makes it easier to glue required components together in order to build a custom platform.
See how OpenCrowd's Migration Services can help you migrate application components to open source software.
Partner platform
External applications built for clients (partners and brokers) to provide automated access to internal applications. Such applications require the cost of scaling to be incremental and not be dependant on user seats. By selecting the right set of open source technologies a low cost per user platform can be built.
See how OpenCrowd's Custom Development approach can help you develop and operate partner platforms at a reduced cost of ownership.
Best practices from open source development communities
Open source communities has been very successful in building software products on a distributed development platform based on several collaboration techniques and tools like wiki's, blogs, and discussion forums. Some of these techniques and tools should be used by enterprise to facilitate collaboration cross business units and development teams to introduce shorter project cycles and better co-ordination.
See how OpenCrowd's Collaboration Offering can introduce a collaborative workspace in your organization
Tools and techniques for development and testing
Many of the tools used by enterprise developers are either open source or derived from an open source project. Some of the success in producing good quality software by the community in a quick time frame can be attributed to the availability of open source development and testing tools as well as test-driven development methodology. Enterprise should look to integrating these tools to provide a common development environment for its team.
See how OpenCrowd's System Performance Offering can bring open source software to help with your application development and testing.
Platforms based on emerging standards
Most open source projects are based on open standards and have done very well in adopting emerging standards at a much faster pace. For SOA based platforms where interoperability is a critical requirement, an ESB or web services infrastructure based on the right mix of closed and open source technologies provides a cost effective solution to support the scalability and the interoperability requirements of an enterprise.
See how OpenCrowd's experience with web services technologies can help you adopt emerging standards and integrate systems on an open standard.
