Twenty years ago, when the web was just
starting to become available to consumers, a large proportion of non-tech
websites was essentially advertising space: ephemeral virtual billboards
promoting some aspect of an organisation’s product or service, but driven
mostly by marketing departments with no solid connection to day to day
business. Having been involved in developing website sin those days, and having
often argued in vain with my customers that their web presence needed to be
more than just a one-off disconnected experiment, it’s still remarkable to me
that today the online world has so quickly become intrinsic to our lives. Today
it is the disconnected organisation that is the anomaly: the first thing
anyone does when starting up a new business these days is to check whether
their proposed company name is available as a domain name, with changes made if
it is not. Customers expect an online-first and mobile-first experience: we all
know people who will skip past providers if they don’t have an easy-to-navigate
site that lets them conduct business online, rather than having to telephone,
or even worse: do something in person.
So, it’s a truism that customers expect to
be able to access business services on their own terms, and to be able to do as
much as possible online without having to resort to (potentially) slower
methods of interaction. Businesses have to 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. In
order to be truly effective, a company's digital entry-point must be able to
reach directly into the workings of the organisation to be able to handle
transactions in real-time and satisfy customer’s demands. This is the crux of
digital transformation: the business processes that used to be kept internal to
an organisation have to be codified and expressed in a way that makes it easy
for customers to interact with the company… or else they will simply go to a
competitor who can offer that experience.
This approach can be relatively easy when
starting from scratch, but for established businesses the need to unravel years
(or decades) of business logic and interconnected systems can become a
nightmare, especially when time-to-market is important to satisfy customers’
ever-growing demands. Even for new companies, the need to constantly refresh
and update quickly brings its own challenges: the market is never static, and
if a competitor finds a new and more attractive way of providing the
service, then a response needs to be found quickly.
Many organisations
are turning to agile methodology and the associated
concepts of DevOps and continuous integration to attempt to address the need
for speedy time-to-market, yet the challenge for IT organisations is how to
provide the systems needed to support the new approaches when up to 70% of their resources are spent just keeping the lights on in their
day-to-day operations.
This is where open-source technology can
help. In recent years the vast majority new systems innovation has arisen from
the open-source arena; almost all cutting-edge technologies have an open-source
aspect, 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
underlying the modern web beyond the traditional proprietary boundaries. While
open source software itself is not at all new, it has in recent years become
the mainstream way of developing innovative ideas – based in most part on the
foundation of that quintessential open source project: GNU/Linux. The
freely-available nature of the Linux OS provides a platform with a level
playing field for involvement, and the free GNU tools (compilers, libraries,
and development environments) also lower entry barrier for new developers
who can contribute towards community projects. Some of these projects can be
tiny, perhaps with only a single contributor. Others, such as the OpenStack
cloud infrastructure project, can include thousands of developers, project
managers, and technical writers from big corporations, research organisations,
and individuals.
The open nature of development means that
more eyes and more ideas are brought to bear on a project: performance and
security issues have a higher chance of being observed and resolved, with
individual developers eager to make and maintain their personal credentials,
and little to no opportunity for sweeping problems “under the carpet” to
meet a specific deadline, as is the risk with closed, proprietary code. The
open development also means that users aren’t locked-in to a particular
vendor’s technology, or subjected to the risk of either unconscionable
price hikes, or the prospect of a product being “killed” due to an
acquisition or other business imperative.
Of course, the challenge for IT managers
when applying open source technology is how to support it – and especially how
to support it whilst maintaining their existing systems. The widely-available
nature of open source may make it very cost-effective to acquire, but those
savings can be quickly eroded if an organisation has to employ their own
experts to build, manage, maintain, and integrate those technologies, and can
be a risky undertaking if those key employees leave the company for any reason
(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 ever enterprise-ready version of Linux, and it has been
building and integrating “infrastructure software” for enterprise ever since. This
(profitable) longevity means that even though the technologies it products may
be cutting-edge, the engineering and support is solid and reliable. A lot of
this success is based on the hugely experienced development team, which makes
up over 50% of the company’s employees. The egalitarian nature of open source development
communities 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, with the
added result that the real-world scenarios they observe 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 the
reactive, adaptive, and innovative technologies that will make it possible to
deliver on consumer expectations at a price point that is affordable, and to do
so 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.
