In a climate of financial fear, uncertainty and doubt it is ironic that we suddenly see a lot of people predicting the rise of open source platforms to take advantage of this situation. Not only Linux for servers and workstations, but also other tools that are more central to an organisations day to day business.

In my own work I have recently seen a massive surge in the use of Tomcat as the basis upon which to build many software products. In fact, if you go to many doctors in New Zealand, there is a very good chance they could be running Tomcat to provide access to the ACC information systems. I’m also seeing a large number of organisations looking at migrating their databases to free platforms such as PostgreSQL and MySQL. All this completely transparent to the end user buying the software. They still see the app they’re used to seeing in the front end. Or they get a web interface to some of the newer features.

OpenOffice.org has released version 3.0.0. This completely free office suite of tools offers many of the features that companies pay many thousands of dollars for from other providers, but at absolutely none of the cost. It even supports saving and opening Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2008 documents. While there are some features it doesn’t have when compared with the latest versions of Microsoft Office, those features are often not used by a very large number of people. There are even third party applications available to OpenOffice.org users that provide all the features of SharePoint, and then some.

Zimbra and a number of other platforms on the market offer nearly all the features of Microsoft Exchange but starting at none of the cost.

The time of the massive spend on IT infrastructure is well and truly over. Those companies that have not already spent the money on upgrades in recent times are probably not very likely to do so in the near future unless there is an extremely compelling reason to do so. Licensing costs of platforms like the various versions of Windows 2008 are going to find themselves in a very dangerous position. Companies are going to take a far more concerned look at the actual make up of the expense charts of any purchases and Windows 2008, whether you keep it for another 5 years or not is still an expensive product. Even Software Assurance is going to take a hit from this.

Oracle is in a very difficult spot also. They really have to provide good reason to use their database over many other contenders on the market. Fortunately, I can think of many reasons to keep using Oracle (especially in clustered environments) where as I struggle to think of a single reason why a Windows server is still on the top of a company’s list, short of the incumbent factor.

Consider the simple fact that instead of paying for licensing as well as the cost of ongoing maintenance, you could instead pay nothing for the licensing and require fewer staff to manage more servers. While the skill level of that staff may require you pay them more, the reduction in overall costs would be substantial. Fewer staff, no license headache, no

Cloud computing is fast becoming the cliché of 2007/2008. It will continue to do so for a while. The idea of moving the management and maintenance hassles of your IT infrastructure out to being someone elses problem, for a fraction of the cost of continuing to host it in house, is extremely desirable in the current economic downturn.

What do the next few months hold for your organisation? How do you see the changes in the economies affecting your business and the decisions you make regarding your IT infrastructure? Does the current climate of economic uncertainty give you more reason to consider open source alternatives? Or are you like the many millions out there that will just continue to use what you have until such time as you have no choice but to replace it?