How open-source can be the true catalyst for digital change

Peter Lees, Chief Technologist, SUSE Asia-Pacific

Peter Lees, Chief Technologist, SUSE Asia-Pacific

Twenty years ago, at the beginning of the web becoming available to consumers, many websites were essentially virtual billboards promoting products or services, driven by marketing with no solid connection to day-to-day business. At the time, I often tried to convince the customers that their web activities and real-world business needed to be more closely aligned. It’s therefore, remarkable to me that today the online world has become built-in to our lives now.

Today, a disconnected organisation is an anomaly. Customers expect to access services on their own terms: online-first or mobile-first, and be able to do everything online without resorting to slower methods of interaction. Businesses must provide this ease-of-access or risk being passed by, but developing and maintaining the degree of interaction required is much more complex than the advertising websites of the 1990’s. To be truly effective, a company's digital entry-point must reach directly into the workings of the organisation and handle transactions in real-time. This is the crux of digital transformation: business processes that used to be internal to an organisation must be codified and expressed to make it easy for customers to interact with the company or else they will find a competitor who can offer that experience.

This approach is hard enough when starting from scratch, but established businesses may also need to unravel years (or decades) of business logic and interconnected systems: a nightmare, especially when time-to-market is vital to satisfy customers’ demands. Even for new companies, constantly refreshing and updating brings its own challenges: the market is never static, and if a competitor unveils a more attractive way of providing the service, a response needs to be found quickly.

Many organisations are adopting agile methodology and the related concepts of DevOps and continuous integration to satisfy the need for speedy time-to-market, yet the challenge for IT organisations is in providing the systems needed to support these approaches when up to 70 percent of the resources are spent just keeping the lights on1.

This is where open-source technology can help. While open-source software itself is not at all new, it has become the mainstream way of developing innovative ideas, with industry giants such as Google, Intel, IBM, and even Microsoft embracing open-source as a way to accelerate development and spread the adoption of the technologies – based mostly on the foundation of that quintessential open source project: GNU/Linux. The freely-available nature of the Linux OS provides a level playing field for involvement, and the free GNU tools (compilers, libraries, etc.) also lower barriers for new developers.

Open source development means more eyes and more ideas are brought to a project: performance and security issues have more chance of being observed and resolved, as individual developers seek to develop personal credentials, meaning little opportunity to sweep problems “under the carpet” to meet a deadline – one risk of closed, proprietary code. Open development also means that users aren’t locked-in to one vendor’s technology, or face the risk of price hikes, or of a product being “killed” due to an acquisition or other business change.

The challenge for IT managers using open source technology is how to support it – especially how to support it whilst maintaining existing systems. The widely-available nature of open-source makes it very cost-effective to acquire, but savings can be quickly eroded if an organisation must employ their own experts to integrate & maintain those technologies, and can be at risk if those key employees leave the company (or even want to take a vacation). That’s where open-source software companies such as SUSE come in. Over 25 years ago the Germany-based software company produced the first enterprise-ready version of Linux, and has been building and integrating “infrastructure software” for enterprises ever since. This longevity means that even though the technologies it produces are cutting-edge, the engineering and support is solid and reliable. Much of this success is due to the experienced development team, which makes up for over 50 percent of the company’s employees. The egalitarian nature of open-source development means that an individual developer’s personal credibility is extremely important in making a difference in the direction of an upstream project, and since SUSE boasts some of the most experienced developers in the industry, their influence can be seen across a wide range of projects, meaning the real-world scenarios observed in customers’ workloads are considered when making changes or improvements.

The message, then, for CIO’s wanting help with digital transformation, is to look to the open-source world for reactive, adaptive, and innovative technologies that will make it possible to satisfy consumer expectations at a price point that is affordable. This can be done with the help of an experienced open-source partner who can provide the enterprise-grade support necessary to provide the stability needed for a reliable business.