Open Source Is Not the Same As An Open Service

The reader who responded to my column suggested IBM Lotus Domino as a less lock-in-prone alternative to Exchange. Domino does run on a broader range of platforms than does Exchange, but I was thinking more along the lines of Yahoo’s Zimbra Collaboration Suite.

Like Exchange and Domino, Zimbra may be deployed and run, with support, in on-premises or hosted flavors. And, like Domino, Zimbra runs on multiple server platforms. Unlike Exchange or Domino, Zimbra is open-source software, which means that organisations can use, modify and redistribute the server without requiring any relationship with Yahoo.

Another vendor of open-source enterprise software that’s taking a similar tack is SugarCRM, which offers access to its wares in on-premises and free, community-supported scenarios, as well as in a Sugar-hosted version running atop the company’s Sugar Open Cloud.

Open source can serve as an excellent escape valve for the pressure of vendor lock-in because it leaves organisations free to pack up the application and walk away from vendor relationships that aren’t working – regardless of where in the stack those vendors are situated.

What’s more, companies that choose open source leave themselves the option of fixing or extending the functionality of the applications they depend on.
Of course, the “open-source” label alone doesn’t guarantee suitability – you have to ensure that the open-source application in question can suit your needs. What’s more, the fact that open-source applications enable companies to get under the hood and make modifications doesn’t mean they’ll wish to seize this opportunity.

Go for hosted

For these reasons, I think that some of the most attractive open-source enterprise applications are those arranged like Zimbra, with hosted subscription, on-premises and no-strings-attached (or independent, if you prefer) options.

We take it for granted that the best enterprise applications will enable our data to flow into other applications. Considering the way that virtualisation and cloud computing are delivering organisations more choices than ever in the platforms that serve our workloads, it’s fair that we begin to extend our portability expectations beyond data to include the applications themselves.