Enterprise digital transformation, in many ways, is a race against time. Today’s ‘connected’ consumers and technologies are evolving faster than an enterprise can adapt. The old ways of delivering digital experience ought to be replaced by more agile and all-embracing newer methods.
Increasingly, businesses are turning to Open Source to facilitate this change, as it outperforms proprietary technologies on quality, cost, customization, and security.
The global leaders in digital platform, be it Google or Apple or Facebook, are running their platforms on Linux. And it’s nearly impossible to find a Fortune 50 company that’s not relying heavily on Open Source.
Open Source acts as catalyst for the digital transformation revolution by delivering agility, fostering innovation, and reducing dependency on expensive vendors.
The Digital Conundrum
Businesses across industries are experiencing massive data growth, driven by pervasive use of mobile apps, IoT, wearables & sensors, social platforms and many more.
At the same time, technological innovations have raised customer expectations. Customers now want faster access to services, 24/7 connectivity, multichannel platforms, and personalized experience. Businesses are under increased pressure to innovate and deal with competition, while cutting down on their cost to serve customers.
The data deluge and dynamic business requirements are putting tremendous pressure on IT. IT departments are now expected to be more agile and flexible, keeping cost under control and ensuring security and compliance.
Choosing proprietary technologies would mean that the IT can focus only on one area at a time, slowing down the pace of change needed to transform different functions. This further leads to bigger challenges such as Shadow IT for CIOs.
Today, more than 70 percent of end users expect an IT project to take less than two weeks. The days of 18-month lead times are forever gone! Your technology stack and development processes must be agile and flexible than before. If you do not have a platform which is scalable, flexible, allows innovations and is quick enough to turn around, you’re chancing your arm.
Mobile, Hybrid Cloud, IoT: Ruled by Open Source
As mobile becomes a great medium to bring new experience to customers, organizations are now focusing on delivering secure and scalable applications in a much shorter time. This requires different development style, architectures, application frameworks and new kind of infrastructures as enablers. Open source is a thus becoming a preferred choice for Application development and DevOP environments today.
And behind the scene, Hybrid Cloud and Software-defined data centers are the foundations for almost everything that’s happening in the customer-facing digital business. In both these areas, we are well past the ‘Proprietary OR Open Source’ discussion. Open Source is now a clear winner in the Cloud space.
A median user runs 61–80 percent of their overall cloud infrastructure on OpenStack, while a typical large user reports running 81–100 percent of their infrastructure on OpenStack, according to the latest OpenStack User Survey. As Hybrid Cloud is predicted to be the way forward, organizations are already leveraging both Public and Private Cloud capabilities in their environments. Open Source is the only option for them from an interoperability and scalability perspective.
What’s more, an increasing number of enterprises globally consider Open Source to be the realistic or preferred solution for migrating to Software-Defined-Infrastructure.
IoT, another key ingredient of a digital business, is already an Open Source-driven technology. A sizeable number of organizations have turned to Open Source to leverage the true value of IoT. As multiple smart devices and platforms get connected, organizations do not want to limit flexibility and create fragmentation by using closed systems.
In days to come, Open Source is going to have a big role in defining whether an organization is a digital leader or a digital laggard.
- by Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, Country Head, SUSE
