INDIA: Having a strong hold over the open source market has been a challenge for companies in this space. One solution that small players are adopting to survive in the market is to come under the brand name of the experts in the field. For example, MySQL which had been acquired by Sun Microsystems, decided to go for the acquisition not out of a shortage of funds to run the company. The company saw the acquisition as another way to broaden the product reach. "It is the only way to maximize the reach of the product and to get the product adopted in a substantial way. And the reason for being acquired by Sun was not just the $1 billion, but also the company's strength in the open source arena," said David Axmark, Co-founder, MySQL.

He also cited that innovations in open source might be small but it will revolutionize the industry. According to Gartner, the year 2012 will mark a time when 80 percent of all commer­cial software will include open source elements. The report claims that companies that fail to embrace open source software will be at a significant cost disadvantage.

The myth

There is a general perception in the industry that open source products are restricted to just desktops, and it still has a long way to go for being adopted in mission critical applications. However, the adoption of Linux in recent times, starting from hand held devices to servers in the data centers, has got rid of perception that open source is still in a sluggish adoption stage, restricted to desktops alone. "Many enterprises like Satyam, Sify, Cognizant have already started doing projects and many of their servers runs only on the Linux operating system (OS). Whoever gets trained by us on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl, PhP) is immediately being placed in these major companies," informed S Gopal, CEO, Nace Solutions, a Chennai-based software training and consulting company.

According to Sandeep Menon, Country Head, Novell India, "Open source could offer variety of opportunities for a system integrator (SI). There are various packets where people could play in the Linux area. Starting from setting up a remote helpdesk, the utility of Linux could be as complex as having three people on the site setting up a state data center using a mainframe around Linux. So there is a whole gamut of things from where people can pick up their role in offering the services," he claimed. He said that there are tremendous opportunities ahead in open source, as the market grows every year outstripping its previous year's growth.

The cost and the ability to customize the product and free availability of the source code are the primary drivers of the open source model in India.

Growth drivers

The cost and the ability to customize the product and free availability of the source code are the primary drivers of the open source model in India.

Sudhir Gandotra, CEO, IndServe Infotech, the owner of product called OpenLx Linux opined that on the price and product feature front, open source model has overtaken the proprietary model. "For building a mail server within a budget of Rs 2 lakh, open source is the only way, as the solution itself would cost so much in the proprietary model," Gandotra claimed.

Gandotra cited three reasons for the increasing adoption of the open source. "Cost of the software, cost of its implemen­tation and maintenance are the key factors that a customer considers while adopting a technology. All these are cheaper as compared to the proprietary model and this is the primary reason for customers adopting open source," he claimed.

Menon of Novell cited a report, which said that people who uses open source saved almost 40 percent in their hardware costs. "In some test cases people have saved as much as 40 percent in the hardware cost, as they could use Linux on X86 hardware and traditionally they spent a lot of money on RISC Unix hardware. After shifting to Linux using AMD or Intel they have saved the hardware cost and by bringing an alternative to Microsoft, they have saved on the software cost. There has been an average saving of 40 percent in the hardware cost and 34 percent in the software cost. So customers end up saving a lot by shifting to open source," Menon claimed.

Another major factor that is attracting customers towards open source today is security. The threat of virus in Linux is zero percent.

Almost every government organization in the country runs its operations on the Linux OS due to the cost and security factors.

Vendors in the space

Sun Microsystems enjoys a top place in the open space arena and it is the largest enterprise contributor to open source. Besides Sun, there are players like Novell, Red Hat, Oracle, IBM and many open source start-ups. Even Google and Microsoft are promoting open source-based community of developers. Open source is not just for large players like Sun and Oracle, but they make more sense for new entrants. It helps the developer to get potential customers interested even before the product is ready for Beta users. Further, dual licensing helps a smaller company license technology to compete with closed source larger players.

MySQL had a continuous revenue stream in the form of support and consulting revenues. Also, for corporate users having access to source code even before buying, helps them to evaluate the quality of their source code and they are also assured of having community support and access to source code.

Role for SPs

Menon felt that the SP network still lags behind the actual product growth of open source. "This means that automatically, there is a gap opening up for SPs. The customers are hiring in-house resources due to the lack of enough SPs. However, the in-house resources are not a long time cost-effective solution and customers do need to ultimately depend on SPs," Menon claimed.

Ashish Banerjee, Chief Software Technologist, Sun Microsystems India, felt that SPs have the capability to customize things according to the needs of the customers, and need not depend on the developers for everything. They could deploy their own team for the customization of the solution.

Challenges faced by SPs

The challenges are quite different here depending on the deployment. According to Menon, the challenges during end-user deployment are both product and people related, as it's a difficult task to convince the users, who have been using a particular OS for a long time. "The customer needs to be educated on this aspect, on the process of adopting open source. The initial end-user resistance has to be handled; initial desktop deployment could be quite complicated as the user needs vary a lot and it becomes quite a challenging task to manage a huge deployment for an SP, so we carry out the projects only in phases," Menon informed. The deployment of open source in the server area is not that challenging, except that of having a trained manpower. "During a major transition to the open source, which involves 15 to 20,000 systems in a huge enterprise, the customer prefers a large SP. We have high-end service partners for catering to huge enterprise and middle range of SPs, who can cater to SMB segments. Handling huge projects and mass transitions and deployment would be a challenge for the mid-tier SPs due to the lack of manpower," he said.

Banerjee felt that another challenge for SPs is the lack of strong bondage between the developer communities.

Business future

Menon said that every single technology that is driven by open source brings in tonnes of services opportunities. "Our estimate is that for every $1 of Linux business that we do, there is $3 of service opportunity generated in the market," he informed.

However, Banerjee felt that open source is the corner stone of their development strategy. "All of our software and systems IP are in open source. Open source allows our partners to innovate with us as a community, and all stakeholders can influence and contribute to the future product roadmaps. Also, government and startups benefit the most from the open source model. Open source also ensures that the systems are secure and don't have any hidden trap doors. We are seeing a healthy adoption of open source in the near future," Banerjee claimed.

Menon felt that rather than SPs convincing the customers to go for open source, it's happening the other way around. "The customers are aware of the advantages of open source and they are actually pushing the SPs to offer them services on the open source front, as many SPs are still offering traditional services. Every major vendor, who is creating new applications and products is making it compatible for working with Linux, as everyone feels that open source and Linux is going to be the future. Earlier, the world was split largely between Unix and Windows, but the future is going to be largely split between Linux and Windows and the whole world is aware of this," Menon averred.