Open Source Applications and Managed Services - Where is the Value in your Provider?

We are Catalyst love free and open source applications. It’s what we live and breath, we love being able to provide top shelf software solutions for our clients using this flexible and mature tool set.

We earn our revenue delivering "project" - building, customising, integrating, training and whatever else - and "managed services" - what people once called 'hosting' but is really much more - for our international client base.

Not to blow our own trumpet, but Catalyst does a pretty good job providing managed service offering for Enterprise open source application workloads on AWS, Azure, OpenStack or other infrastructure platforms. One way we explain this to our clients is that we, Catalyst, are the one-stop-shop for application responsibility. From the application code all the way to the cloud infrastructure. We are the first point of call, and ideally we have already noticed via proactive monitoring.

Given that there is no secret sauce in the application code itself - it's all open source, right - it might not be clear what our core value proposition in our managed service offering. If all the application code is free and open, couldn't anyone just do what we do?

Sure! And we welcome the competition. The more of us supporting open source solutions, the better.

Answer is that the "value" here is our team, processes and the skill and experience we have developed over the years, meaning we can deliver on the responsibility that we have contractually accepted. And we can do this cost effectively.

In the IT contractual world, we have all seen terrible contracts from vendors that can make it challenging for a client to move on from one provider/product to another. Whether it's minimum notice periods, disengagement fees, not having access to all your data (you never owned it apparently) or just overly restrictice contractual terms.

Catalyst believes that one of the strengths of open source applications is that clients can control their data better. Ideally they should have access to the full gambit of all application data, and be able to export and examine it at their whim. Clients should also never have their data held to ransom should they wish to move on to another provider.

And we encourage all other providers of solutions based on open source technolgies to do the same. Deliver high levels of service and your client base will only grow.

This is one of the other great value proposition's of Open Source technologies. Clients (should) get more control of your data, independent of any of the vendors or providers that you are using. Even if you don't own the source code, the open source licence gives you the right to use it regardless of your commercial relationship with any of your providers.

So please, when assessing the contracts for your next Enterprise Open Source applications with the vender of your choice, make sure that you are not being handcuffed contractually.

And when in doubt, choose open source.