Open Source Flexibility Means Agile Systems

There's been a few interesting posts on open source lately.

Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO at Sun, recently noted a major global client had open source as one of their top priorities for the year. See his blog at http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/date/20080729?cid=926298. The client had found a number of successful open source projects had sprung up within his organisation, for tasks that were too expensive or difficult to solve with proprietary technologies. Jonathan is seeing this with nearly every customer he meets.

The point is the flexibility (given you/we can work with the code) and availability (often its free) of open source software - makes it an extremely useful tool. One you can modify and streamline typically more easily than proprietary software, to your business needs.

That flexibility is vitally important in a growing business. How easy (and expensive) is it to change an existing proprietary software solution, when your key business processes change? What about as the market you operate in changes - how do you remain agile if your systems cannot? Good systems support your working practices and help you deliver value and thus ongoing if not increased revenues.

For those of you software-development savvy, a key will be ensuring development is multi-tier and customisations easily distinguishable from core code. We don't want to end up with just another run of huge legacy systems that are difficult to maintain. And that's a key area we're working on to ensure the long term viability of an open source ERP solution in a business.