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Open Source Technology Update

Breaking Away

4/1/2007

If you hitch your wagon to the wrong open source project and it loses steam, you could wind up with a dead-end technology.
— Ed Golod, Revenue Accelerators

Smaller vendors are also working to fan the open source flames. In February, Centric CRM and a dozen other open source companies formed the Open Solutions Alliance. The group aims to promote interoperability and enhanced support for open source applications. Major integrators including Unisys have lined up to support the alliance, though it’s unclear how soon their work will result in new integration hooks that universities can leverage.

Look Before Leaping

As the open source sector continues to grow, the ERP market continues to consolidate through numerous mergers and acquisitions, leaving Oracle, SAP AG, and other companies such as SunGard as the primary choices for such commercial ERP systems. To be sure, the remaining commercial options continue to offer clear benefits. Generally speaking, they are highly scalable, incredibly reliable, and secure. Plus, they are backed by thousands of integrators and valueadded resellers (VARs) that can service and support the deployments.

By contrast, open source solutions typically have only scattered support in the VAR and integrator community. Even market leaders such as Red Hat have only a few hundred Linux VARs across the globe—compared to tens of thousands of partners supporting Microsoft’s Windows Server, SQL Server, and related applications. And while server hardware suppliers such as IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems support Linux, that doesn’t mean they’ll be familiar with niche open source projects and modules that pop up across the globe.

KNOW YOUR OPTIONS

Category Commerical Options Open Source Options
Operating Systems

Apple, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems

Novell, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Xandros

Databases

IBM, Microsoft, Oracle

MySQL, EnterpriseDB

E-mail / Collaboration

IBM/Lotus, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle

Open-Xchange, Zimbra

Applications

Lawson, Oracle, SAP

Centric CRM, JasperSoft, SpikeSource, SugarCRM

IP Communications / VoIP

3Com, Avaya, Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel

Asterisk, Digium, Fonality



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