The case for open source

10 February 2012

12 March 2010 Daniel Shane

Cost and flexibility make open source software a compelling proposition, said Talend's Martin James

The reasons for adopting open source software are simple, said Martin James, sales director for open source data management software vendor and event sponsor Talend: flexibility and price.

One company to have made the leap is telecommunications giant and Talend customer Vodafone, which under UK law is required to store and be able to quickly retrieve vast amounts of call data information for up to seven years. “They already had a solution for data integration and ETL [extract, transform, load], but the problem was that it was very expensive,” he told delegates. “This project, which they have to do because of regulatory requirements, cannot generate money either.” In this sense, he explained, Talend’s data solution was ideal, being both low-cost and customisable.

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This article accompanies the following feature: Rethinking IT Cost – A report from Information Age's Managing IT Cost Effective seminar

James moved to debunk some of the conceptions of hidden costs commonly associated with open source, such as technical support, third-party application compatibility and code quality.

In each case, he referred to the vibrant Internet communities that constantly analyse, develop and improve open source. “We have customers who have chosen us simply because of the amount of activity on our [community] forums,” James claimed. “When we launched a new version of our software a few months ago, we had 1,000 beta testers verifying the code.”

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