Why is ‘Open Source’ a big bet for Techpreneurs?



Wipro  CEO TK Kurian recently announced that his company would be making significant investments in building advisory capability and creation of IP to gain industry leadership in the Open Source space. Lets revisit where this announcement roots from? According to a research by 2020 over 50 billion intelligent devices will connect and exchange information in various forms.  Open source offers substantial cost savings as compared with a legacy based proprietary application, which according to me;  buyers sees as a burden while organizations want to optimize the overall cost or look at the TCO in this case. 

Pure solution providers like IBM, Wipro, Infosys, HCL etc work on customized business applications for clients, typically mid to large organizations, from banks to telecom to hospitality to retail to services. Business process of each of their client is not the same. So as a solution provider; open source offers agility in application development process resulting into quicker deployment at marginally low cost. Also, migration from vendors like SAP or Oracle or any other license based legacy platform; which costs them slightly high because of licensing or customization needs, would become more competitive to justify the cost vs benefits. The existing solution offers them high ‘Total cost of ownership’ with  limited options to customize and migrate when they really want to get rid off from their existing vendor. 

Open source platforms would not only help them in taking full control of workflow based or simple template based applications but also would quickly help them code standard features and functionality would be pre-integrated. Cross platform integration becomes seamless, so are the business benefits from this.

As a business user how am I impacted?  I see mobility and ease while using various business applications of the organization I am dependent on.  Imagine, your bank allows you to pay your mobile bill without logging into your telecom operator’s web-system and then initiate the payment through internet banking with over 5 steps. You may reduce this into two simple steps at the same time by offering you comfort from the security aspect. More to come..stay tuned.

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