Gan Boon San President for Asia South,
Sun Microsystems
ACROSS the globe and across industries, the financial meltdown is taking its toll on anyone running a business - multinational, regional or local. The pressure to cut and consolidate has never been higher. That is why it is critical to examine all of the options out there - not only to save dollars today, but also to position your company for growth and opportunity in the long run. In exploring alternatives, question the norms and examine options that require little opportunity cost and trade-offs.
One of these options is open source technology. If you think open source is only for geeks and student activists, think again. Open source technology gives access to intellectual property without barriers to adoption, exit and without barriers of licensing to build network infrastructure. In other words, there are no costs involved.
In fact, the open source model offers genuinely collaborative innovation. The technologies are robust and secure - they often have to withstand the rigorous testing and improvements by communities. And, to avoid the risks in community-delivered support, there are enterprise-class support services by trusted vendors available.
Perhaps that is why findings from research firm Gartner projects that by 2012, 90 per cent of the world's companies will be using open source software - globally.
The question to ask today is: Why wait till 2012? You can be in the position to drive progress and cost savings today for your company. In fact, we could take a leaf out of the resourcefulness of the developing world. In companies across India, China, Eastern Europe, South and Central America, companies are dominantly using open source to create enormous wealth.
In China and India alone, there are more than a million software developers, many of whom cannot afford punitive technology licence fees, so they default to open source software, like MySQL, Ubuntu Linux, OpenSolaris, Java or OpenOffice.org. Armed with these and the zeal to succeed and overcome adversity, the global market is open to them. Likewise, it is also open to businesses that want to leverage these same technologies that power some of the world's most innovative companies such as Amazon, Google, Nokia and Sun Microsystems.
If you are wondering where to start, start from the most basic. Let me give you an example. OpenOffice.org is a free office productivity suite in use by approximately 100 million users across the world, with concentrations among developing nations. Many governments worldwide, including Malaysia, India, and South Africa, now embrace the open document formats at the heart of OpenOffice (known as 'Open Document Format' or 'ODF'), helping them to bring costs down and ensure all citizens have equal access to important material years from now.
The Brazilian example
On a macro level, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva spearheaded a country-wide movement toward open standards, alongside free and open source software to bridge the technology gap between Brazil and wealthier economies. The result is more than 70 per cent of Brazilian enterprises using open source software today, a robust domestic software economy, and tens of millions of Brazilians participating on the network - opening new markets, new online bank accounts, creating new Internet businesses, and engaging in the political and electoral process, many for the first time.
So, who can build their business, or their economy, on open source? With the ubiquity of the Internet, open source is becoming the foundation of the world's most sophisticated (and lucrative) business models. From free search (Baidu) to free social networking (Xiaonei or Minglebox), free news (FT.com and Sina.com) to free software (Sun Microsystems).
Indeed, as we deep dig, we can look towards these emerging businesses and economies which have the least to spend in recognising the immense economic value of leveraging free and open technologies - open source.
This article was first published in The Business Times on November 08, 2008.
