The Financial Crisis Cries for More Open Source

Companies in a tough economy should seek alternative software options, says the CEO of open-source database-maker Ingres.

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An open-source user who has worked with both Linux and Ingres agrees. Alan Nidiffer, VP and CIO at C&K Market, a West Coast grocery chain, recently explained why open source offers more innovation and faster development times. According to Nidiffer, the set release schedules of traditional software companies slow down innovation, whereas open-source improvements come at any time. He notes that innovative features can even come from software developers outside of his company; they have fresh ideas on how to continuously improve the applications.

Open source now provides a complete stack of enterprise-grade software backed by excellent support, and rivals the technological strength of traditional proprietary vendor offerings. Successful implementations for mission-critical workloads continue to dismiss concerns about support, security and reliability. As more customers share their open source success stories, first-time open source users now have powerful innovators and role models to follow.

For example, I met recently with a customer who processes more than $100 billion a day in fund transfers for 160 banks using an open source stack that includes the Ingres database and Red Hat's JBoss application server. Meanwhile, customers from diverse industries spanning airlines (Lufthansa) and manufacturing (PPG Industries) to grocery store chains (C&K Market) and government agencies (National Center for Missing & Exploited Children) are embracing open-source solutions to manage millions of pieces of information critical to run and maintain their businesses, and even save lives. These companies trust open source to do the jobs that must get done, and appreciate the accompanying cost savings, innovation and freedom.

These pioneering companies are choosing to forgo proprietary solutions and adopt open source stacks from companies such as Alfresco, JasperSoft and Ingres, from core database systems to emerging open-source stacks that support enterprise content management, document management, transaction processing and business intelligence.

Savings matters.

According to a recent report from Forrester Research, companies can save as much as 25 percent of their database costs by switching to open-source databases and have the potential of an additional 25 percent savings in hardware costs by using open source on commodity servers. C&K Markets' Nidiffer says his company has saved nearly 20 percent using the Ingres open-source database.

In the coming months and years, I predict that many companies will experience open source benefits, including greater innovation and much lower costs, while delivering the enterprise performance that companies require.

More than 10,000 of our worldwide customers, in sectors ranging from financial services through manufacturing and distribution to the public sector, prove this equation each day.

It is a new time for open source to show its true value as the alternative choice to companies that will be hit hard by the financial crisis.

Roger Burkhardt is president and CEO of Ingres and serves on the company's board of directors. Ingres is a provider of open-source database software, with over 10,000 commercial customers in 56 countries running a variety of business-critical workloads.

Prior to Ingres, Roger was for six years the CTO and executive vice president of the New York Stock Exchange He and his team were responsible for transformation of the NYSE to a fully electronic model.