Enterprise applications require TCO assessment of critical components before leveraging open source community edition !!

To harness the innovation of open source community and optimizing the project cost, organizations across Globe have been adopting open source technologies to build applications.

To leverage the economics and strategic benefits offered by open source technologies; Government of India also adopting the open standards, open source and open technologies for some of the e-governance services.

The objectives are obvious, to have better strategic control with zero vendor lock in and improve the total cost of ownership of the project.

While the use of open source and open standard technologies is stated and benefits looks lucrative; organizations must review thoroughly the use of community edition versus the supported versions of open source technologies. The intent is to consider all aspects of project, mitigating risks and evaluate the total cost ownership without risking the overall project delivery

Some of the benefits of Enterprise editions of open source software tend to outweigh the unsupported versions, especially when deployed for the most critical components of enterprise applications. Here are a few aspects that can be considered during the evaluation process:

-      The enterprise versions have product lifecycle with suggested patches and bug fixes. Before releasing the new version for general consumption, the software gets tested and certified on multiple platform and environments

-      With community editions we have hundreds of projects releasing different versions, schedules, patches having inter dependencies without any explicit support commitment and responsibility. Whereas, enterprise versions emphasize on long term stability and compatibility

-      Enterprise mission critical application requires stability and reliability. Community editions may have variety of features that are functionally not required for the mission, but nevertheless they increase the probability of defects in the software. The enterprise version is tuned for optimal performance keeping in mind that the software will potentially run as part of mission-critical environments. Enterprise versions take the most stable and best features of the community and provide fixed product maintenance cycles and support.

Enterprise editions offers bug fixes, patches and prevent application from vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is required to perform 360degree assessment of all components of enterprise application to leverage community /enterprise version of open source software.  Indeed, it presents the best of both worlds thereby helping organizations realize their innovation goals in a risk-free environment. Organizations, by all means, should promote and continue adoption of Open source and community edition software: but for mission critical applications, Enterprises editions will remain the right choice.

IBM has been at the forefront of contributing to Open source communities for the past 20 years and with Red Hat now, is the world’s largest contributor to Open source. Red Hat has been involved in open source communities from its inception more than 2 decades ago. From Linux to Apache in the 1990s to Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, it has participated in hundreds of open source communities and trade groups.