Businesses will expand the use of OSS in new areas that are essential to their success as they move forward on their digital transformation journey
Software engineering will become a core enterprise capability as companies shift their attention from the digital transformation of individual processes to the business outcomes a digitally transformed organization makes possible. To become a software-powered organization, they need first to recognize and address the concerns of their developers in areas like experience, developer velocity, and software security.
Open Source Software (OSS) offers greater agility, performance, and security than proprietary software. OSS is a crucial driver of enterprise digital innovation.
In a digital-first world where every organization is a software-driven business, open-source software plays a pivotal role across the enterprise technology stack, tech innovation, enhanced customer experiences, and overall digitalization.
What drives the adoption of enterprise open source
Businesses need to transform the level of technology adoption annually through growth, cost-cutting, and architecture improvement initiatives. This enables organizations to evaluate vendor lock-in, technology stack, and financial implications, leading to broader adoption and introduction of open-source technologies.
One of the primary considerations when creating the stacks is choosing open-sourced components. Enterprises have observed that OS could act as a connecting factor where various vendors converged, shortening the time it takes to bring an innovation to market or a customer, thus speeding up the innovation cycle. With this, IoT and edge cloud use cases will take off faster.
Financial Benefits
Open-source software presents a significant cost-saving opportunity since it has no license fee, and businesses can deploy as many instances as needed. Customers may select a suitable managed service to benefit from a third party’s experience with support and maintenance within their environment.
The financial advantage will not emerge in a vacuum; several factors must be considered. These include computing power, headcount, and integration within the existing technical infrastructure, to name a few. The total cost of ownership must also take these factors into account. However, compared to proprietary software options, open-source software typically offers a significant cost advantage due to the absence of licensing fees.
Avoid vendor lock-in
The chances of becoming trapped by the technology or the vendor increase if organizations use a single proprietary technology for their tech stack infrastructure. Vendor lock-in in cloud computing places all reliance on a single vendor, which can be risky because innovation can cause a sudden shift in the technical roadmap.
A single vendor that IT teams are unhappy with could “lock in” the business, which lacks in-house workforce expertise, financial difficulties, expensive switches, and closed-off services. Software developers have the power to create hurdles for users to switch to another product, but there is no such danger when using open-source software. These flexible options allow businesses to organize their operations however they see fit. However, there are no restrictions on the services companies can use or combine in their workflow.
Open-source solutions have great communities
Large communities support the majority of enterprise-level open-source software. These communities constantly seek to improve the solution, share new ideas, share their experiences with it, and increase support for it.
The community and the businesses both profit from this type of environment. Even the way people think is different from those who use proprietary solutions. It focuses on knowledge exchange and capacity building to produce more efficient, superior, and quicker results. In other words, it’s about more than the team’s success.
IT teams can use the community to look for different development methods, troubleshoot issues, find interesting ideas, and find solutions. Organizations can find quick answers to problems that others have already solved and better understand how they use a specific piece of software.
Additionally, joining a sizable community facilitates networking and even helps locate skilled resources which would be “the right fit” for the organization
Improved security and reliable performance
The benefits of an open-source community go far beyond just getting immediate solutions to enterprise problems. The availability of a software’s source code indicates that it has undergone extensive testing and review. Users can all find and report security flaws, bugs, and limitations to the community.
Compared to proprietary solutions, all liabilities are quickly identified and fixed with OS. Transparency and allowing everyone to make improvements, including security, are at the heart of this kind of software.
Additionally, businesses that use the solution and understand how to make it more secure can do this independently without depending on anyone else.
Capability to create novel solutions
In an open-source setting, innovation happens much more quickly. There are several causes for this. To begin with, the nature of open-source solutions allows anyone to view the code whenever they want, comprehend its layout, make customizations, and configure the system to support their creative ideas.
The barrier that prevents innovation is frequently posed by proprietary software vendors, who typically restrict users to what they can do with their solution. The fact that open-source platforms encompass hundreds of comparable products within the environment also explains this anomaly.
Simply put, there are solutions available that companies can add or use for no cost to address various issues. It enables businesses to innovate more quickly and explore more options. The third primary justification is that teams can incorporate any outside solution for innovation because open-source systems frequently have open APIs.
Enterprise IT departments are facing new security challenges due to the emergence of micro services and cloud-native applications. With this, businesses are being forced to think of innovative solutions to manage security at the container level and consider these issues when selecting a container security solution.
Additionally, there is pressure on development teams to produce applications more quickly and stay current with the latest cloud-native technologies. Top talent is hard to come by, and skilled developers are not a cheap resource in today’s fiercely competitive IT environment.
Therefore, increasing the developer’s value to the organization should be a top priority if the company wants to run as efficiently as possible. The study’s findings demonstrate that using open-source software (OSS) gives developers more access to cutting-edge technologies and open-source innovations while increasing their productivity.
OSS has shorter development cycles and rigorous community reviews, making it more dependable and secure than proprietary software. Enterprise development teams can innovate more quickly as a result.
Also Read: Software Application QA Testing: Everything You MUST KNOW in 2023
Businesses will expand the use of OSS in new areas essential to their success as they move forward on their digital transformation journey. Security is one of the most critical technology areas for increasing the application of OSS.
The list includes recent and developing technological fields like AI/big data analytics, container management, and the Metaverse. Additionally, as hybrid cloud computing becomes the standard enterprise operating model and businesses look to expand into new areas like “the edge,” containers will become increasingly important.