For more than a year now, businesses have depicted a similar set of urgent concerns: The first is about pace and agility: The key question is how businesses can release applications that boost their product offerings, increase customer loyalty, and make them function more effectively. The second, linked question is that of strategic survival: How can businesses acquire more perspectives from increasing data and then leverage these insights on time?
Today, migrating to the cloud has led to enormous opportunities for organizations: Particularly when it comes to changing the status quo and bring profound and impactful changes in the enterprise architecture. Proprietary solutions may bring a new set of challenges when it comes to co-ordinating between on-premise tech and various other sources. It is here that open solutions can act as a panacea. Based on insights from Forbes let’s delve deeper into why open source needs to be a part of your analytics strategy in 2021.
Adaptability and a provider agnostic approach
Open-source applications and data formats, as well as APIs, known to offer a great degree of flexibility and choice. If a client is dissatisfied with a vendor’s goods or services, they can always choose to go with another vendor. Portability is often critical in the event that you choose to change providers to satisfy cost or regulatory requirements. This is a form of corporate resilience that allows the company to think on a broader canvas about future plans and avoiding potential business bottlenecks.
As the market matures and the company grows, the requirements too may change significantly. It is mandated then that the product and services too must change based on market requirements. If this does not happen then the company has an expensive migration ahead. With an open source approach, you don’t have to take the vendor at their word. You can avoid putting your precious resources into a product that is no longer feasible. With open source, different vendors can be compared based on development velocity and the health of the community. A more diverse and active community shall lead to healthier product life span. According to McKinsey, companies in the top quartile of the Development Velocity Index, outperform their peers by 4 to 5 times.
Independence and Longevity
According to Forbes, 90% of all startups crash and burn, and less than half of small and midsize companies last more than five years. Since migrating to a different vendor incurs significant costs with a conventional proprietary approach, it’s wise to avoid product that can be maintained by only one vendor that can only be supported by one vendor.
Open source software allows communities to collaborate on software development. OpenStack, for example, is developed by thousands of businesses and private volunteers, giving consumers peace of mind that no matter what happens to one vendor, another will still be there to help. When a company uses open sourcing, it an investment in the long-haul towards the production team’s efforts towards product implementation. Another advantage is that it is always possible to hire someone from the pool of contributors to keep the deployment alive as you have access to the source code. According to ResearchandMarkets, by 2026, the Open Source Services Market is estimated to reach $66.84 billion.
The road ahead
The flexibility and capabilities that come with creating a hybrid or multi-cloud approach is closely linked to the leveraging open source solutions. It can act as an effective medium to create a hybrid workplace solution for your business with a multi-cloud approach while significantly expanding upon the capabilities that you had when you were siloed. Using open-source software like TensorFlow and Jupyter Notebook can allow your business to better benefit from analytical advancements.
