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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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.”
Also from the Managing IT Cost Effectively seminar
How the recession has changed IT buying behaviour
The economic downturn put the breaks on decision making, said Stephen Martin of Dynamic Markets
Keeping down the energy overhead
The energy costs of IT represent a growing financial burden, said Camco’s Chris Miller
Deriving value from offshore engagements
The offshore outsourcing industry has made some attempts to create value for customers but it not yet a strategic priority, said Stephen Bullas of the European Centre for Offshore Development
