Open source applications can help mitigate SME growth pains

You seek growth and growth is painful

You are an SME (Small Medium Enterprise), also known as an SMB (Small Medium Business), growing beyond the limits of hands-on management by the sole proprietor or a small number of partners working closely together. Your business is stretching the limits of QuickBooks, PeachTree or GnuCash. Your number of employees have grown to handle larger volume of transactions, but the partners still make all the decisions. You've reached a stage where continued growth requires you and your partners to delegate some of the decision making to employees. You find that you have a number of point solutions that do their job adequately but don't share data. You are relying on Excel for operational reports but it takes time and effort to pull the data together. You have come to the conclusion that you need systems that allow your Managers to be effective and feed you the information you need without drowning you in the details of day-to-day operations.

IT or die!

Information Technology (IT) has become a critical, competitive business tool for SMEs:

• After the globalization of markets, SMEs have been under tremendous pressure to integrate themselves with domestic as well as global suppliers and customers to sustain their competitiveness.
• Global players take a shorter life cycle to innovate and work on a fast turnaround time. This places tremendous pressure on SMEs as downstream players to provide the necessary support. With the addition of the stringent requirement placed by international customers, vendor support forms a crucial aspect for SMEs.
• The availability of the right information at the right time is absolutely essential to meet the fast-changing market needs.
  

Infrastructure, desktop or applications?

For SMEs, there are open source options available in three broad categories.

1. On the infrastructure side, you probably are already using Linux operating system in some areas and perhaps Apache, which is the most popular web server software. Open source has become increasingly attractive for SMEs at this level, the commodity part of the computing environment that end users rely on but don't see. Other infrastructure components such as databases, email and directory services use data formats mostly standardized that it is not difficult to move data between products.
2. On the desktop, there are viable open source options emerging, which are covered in our other blogs.
3. But when it comes to user-facing line of business applications, the criteria for evaluation is more complex. On the other hand, the opportunity for setting up your business for growth at reasonable cost is compelling. So, in the next few blogs, we intend focusing on this area.

ERP, CRM and BI require big outlays and long lead times, right?

You hear about other businesses implementing fancy ERP, CRM and BI projects - costing millions and taking several years. At the end of that, some of these projects fail and result in lawsuits. You worry whether it is wise to bet the business on implementing a few expesive, complex and risky enterprise applications, no matter how attractive the benefits appear to be.

However, open source applications have become mature and viable contenders. This is more so in the enterprise applications space. You can aim to minimize cost, lead time and risk in the following ways:

• Cost: You will still have to budget for installation, configuration and integration costs. However, you can avoid licensing costs entirely, if you go with the open source software. Or pay modest license fees, if you decide that you need the commercial open source option. You should also plan for modest ongoing support costs whether you plan to use a commercial open source vendor, consultants or in-house IT staff.
  
• Lead time and risk: You are not investing heavily in licenses and so you are not under pressure to go for ambitious big bang implementations. You can go for a phased approach, gaining incremental benefits and minimizing risk.
  

Open Source concerns

SMEs that have never implemented an Open Source application at an enterprise level, tend to have the following concerns:

1. Concerns about the project viability: The worst case scenario for software buyers comes when the creators of the product stop supporting it or go out of business. Even when you license software from a commercial vendor, you may have to take precautions such as source code escrow. However, with open source projects, you do need to do your due diligence about whether the project is active and has widespread developer support. Once you have done that, you have access to the code, and open source communities provide many avenues of support.
2. Concerns about support: Commercial open source software suppliers commonly provide service contracts to install, customize and maintain their projects. Payments can be tied to progress of work.
   
3. Concerns about quality: The 2005 study of software defect rates by Coverity found that open source projects beat proprietary projects on quality by order of magnitude.
   

Emerging Open Source enterprise applications

Though there are a number of categories within enterprise applications, we have chosen to focus on three broad areas - ERP, CRM and BI. Within these, again there are a large number of open source options. We will focus on a handful of these:

1. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): Compiere and OpenBravo
2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM): SugarCRM
   
3. Business Intelligence(BI):
   
1. Front end: Pentaho and JasperSoft
2. Data integration: Talend
3. Data Warehouse: InfoBright

Options for Open Source support

1. Commercial open source: Many of the leading open source solutions are backed by commercial vendors who offer installation, integration and ongoing support. Depending on how business critical the application is as well as availability of expertise within your employee base and consultants, you can consider this option.
   
2. Internal experts:
   
1. Community support: Successful open-source initiatives spawn active online communities that offer multiple means of support. These include documentation, FAQs, mailing lists and discussion forums. You should plan to have internal engineers who can be held responsible for systems and escalation paths should problems arise.
   
2. Training: You can get your existing engineers trained to work with the software. Training is available from an increasing number of companies.
3. Consultants: Consultants are a viable option for you if you don't have suitable staff or cannot afford full or part time staff. It's best to use consultants to help with the initial installation and configuration while at the same time training your regular employees for ongoing support. For ongoing problems, you can use the consultants on call as needed.

Guidelines for success

We recommend that you follow these guidelines to maximize your chances of success:

• Evaluate with real data: In the case of commercial software, SMEs may often find it difficult to capture the attention of Sales people. This is because Sales people have a better incentive to pursue larger opportunities with billion dollar corporations. In addition, you will have to sign non-disclosure contracts and still not be able to get a full copy of the software for evaluation. On the other hand, the biggest advantage with open source software is 'try before you buy'. You can download open source software at your convenience. Evaluating it with real data will give you a better feel for suitability as well as provide pointers to integration challenges.
  
• Dedicate a testing environment: Once you have selected the software and decided to deploy a pilot for testing, keep a dedicated server with necessary copies of the database and other related software for testing. Any configuration changes, patches and upgrades should be run through this first before deploying to production.
  
• Start small and deploy in a phased manner: Plan on taking baby steps initially. This will give your users as well as the engineers an opportunity to learn as they use it. Once your team has developed some familiarity and confidence, you will be in a better position to decide whether and how to deploy more critical modules.
  

Beyond OLPC

Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and Chairman Emeritus of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Media Lab, started the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project in 2005. This project has so far put about one million low cost educational laptops in the hands of children, mostly in developing countries. Though the OLPC project aimed to get to a price point of $100, the actual price for bulk quantities was reported to have reached about $175.

We need more such initiatives, to push the price point further down, bringing it closer to the reach of developing countries. Here we showcase some large scale educational success stories, at lower price points, where open source is at the core.

Macedonia's Computer for Every Child initiative

Macedonia is one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia in eastern Europe with a population of about 2 million. They decided that if they were to join the ranks of the developed world, they had to be a knowledge and information-based society. In 2004 and 2005 they ran pilot evaluation programs. In 2006 a new government was elected with a mandate to upgrade the education infrastructure of the country. The people in the country agreed to a special tax to help pay for this.

In 2007 chose to deploy Redwood City, CA based NComputing's virtualization software and hardware with Ubuntu Linux 7.04. NComputing's virtualization software and hardware allowed 8 additional user terminals to be connected to a PC (That number has gone up to 10 additional user terminals in the newer NComputing product). NComputing's pricing is said to be as low as $70 per seat for the extra terminals. Including the shared cost of the PC and the cost of the monitors, keboards and mice for each terminal, the total cost was said to be under $200 per seat.

The resulting cost and power savings are critical to school deployments, including in Macedonia, because budgets and electricity are often limited. Macedonia also chose NComputing's technology because maintenance and replacement costs are a fraction of what they are for traditional PC deployments. NComputing's solid-state virtual PC terminals have no moving parts and require little or no maintenance, so the principal maintenance costs follow only the shared PCs and monitors. In addition, in an upgrade cycle to newer PCs, only the PCs themselves, not the virtual PC terminals, need to be replaced.

When completed in 2008, the program had deployed approximately 160,000 NComputing virtual PC terminals and 20,000 NComputing enabled PCs (which each also support a student on the attached monitor). Macedonia installed the open source operating system Ubuntu Linux 7.04. In addition, each computer was installed with open source applications OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, Evolution, and Wine. All of these were localized for the Macedonian language.

(If any of our readers know what educational applications are used by Macedonia, please share it through a comment below. Thanks!)

Brazil aims to bridge the digital gap for 52 million students

In 2008 Brazil decided to do something very similar to provide shared access to 52 million students in a cost effective manner. The chose a pure software based shared desktop solution from Canadian company Userful.

Userful software pricing is said to be less than $50 per additional seat in large deployments (not including monitors, keyboards and mice). Add to this the cost of video cards and USB/2-way-audio hubs, the cost seems to be comparable to the above.

The Brazilian team initially created a localized software package with Brazilian Portuguese based on Debian Linux. However, their current software release called Linux Educacional 3.0 bundles the following open source applications - Kubuntu 8.04 Linux (includes KDE 3.5.10), Firefox, OpenOffice, graphics and multi-media utilities and several educational applications from the KDE Education Project, Kdeedu. These are:

• Educational programming environment using turtle graphics in the Logo language (Kturtle)
• Periodic table of elements (kalzium)
• Virtual planetarium (Kstars)
• Training in Geography (kgeography)
• Learn the Alphabet (klettres)
• Study of the Spanish verb forms (KVerbos)
• Japanese language reference/learning tool (Kiten)
• Hangman word guessing game (khangman)
• Game of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase (Kanagram)
• Program to help revise Latin (klatin)
• Design of mathematical functions (kmplot)
• Exercise with fractions (kbruch)
• Exercises percentages (kpercentage)
• Interactive Geometry (KLG)
• Drawing program for children (Tux paint)
• Editor Tests and examinations (KEduca)
• Game Simon Says (Blinken)
• Flash card program used for vocabulary learning (KWordQuiz)
• Vocabulary trainer (kvoctrain)
• Typing Tutor (ktouch)
  

United Nations pilot program in underdeveloped countries

In June 2009, it was reported that a United Nations initiative has signed up Ncomputing to deliver 1,000 Linux based desktops to pilot programmes at schools in underdeveloped countries. According to that report, a pilot project has already been completed in Burkina Faso, with more projects scheduled for Rwanda, Senegal and Tanzania in 2009.

"The NComputing virtual desktops give us an important opportunity to significantly expand computing access and simplify deployment," said UN project organiser Dr. Paul Jhin. "This maximizes the use of donated and refurbished computers and simplifies deployment and power requirements, which are key issues in many parts of the developing world."

Sugar on a Stick turns your old computer into an OLPC

The OLPC project developed specialized hardware as well as software applications suitable for students from the Kindergarten up to Grade 6. These applications were subsequently spun off into a separate open source project called Sugar Labs. Now Sugar Labs has released these applications, that can be downloaded and used in a USB drive, for use in any Windows or Mac PC.

You’ll basically need to download 'Sugar on a Stick' then “burn” the ISO to the USB thumb drive. Once that process is complete, stick the thumb drive in the old computer’s USB port and boot the machine up (make sure your computer is set to boot from USB). Find detailed instructions here.

Sugar has 60 to 70 applications (called Activities) including vocabulary builders, graphical learning tools as well as advanced science subjects such as Physics. Sugar applications are unique in the following ways:

• They are software packages that automatically save your work producing instances of the Activity that can be resumed at a later time.
• Many Activities support user collaboration where multiple users may be invited to join a collective Activity session.
  

So what's beyond OLPC? OSSTMC (Open Source Shared Terminal for Many Children).

Tags: open source, ncomputing, olpc, userful, sugar

Powell Doctrine And Open Source Migration

The term "Powell Doctrine", named after General Colin Powell, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who later became the Secretary of State of US, was extensively used in the press and TV with reference to the 1990-1991 Gulf War.

According to the Powell Doctrine, the US should only go to war...
...if there is a clear attainable national security objective and if there is an exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement and if ready to use overwhelming force to complete the mission quickly.

I can hear you protest, "But migrating to open source is not like going to war."

Yeah, I agree, it is different, somewhat! But I find that the Powell Doctrine is a good way of communicating this idea.

Sure, you can migrate to Linux on a home PC successfully...
...if you have a demonstrable benefit and if you do some prep work and if you go in with realistic expectations.

"Hey, that's a lot of ifs".

Well, that is my way of saying, Linux is not for everybody!

"So, Linux is for whom?"

I see and hear a lot of different views on this topic in blogs, forums and articles as well as in conferences and conversations. Mostly from techies and also from a lot of journalists. I am trying to put on my Product Management hat and look at it from the users' point of view. What are the demonstrable benefits to the users if they migrate to Linux and open source applications on a home PC?

Clear and present benefit

Let me try and talk about only the home user here. We will try to cover students, small businesses, schools, libraries and others in other blogs. Linux is for you, if:

1. You are assembling or getting a PC assembled from a kit or a bare bones PC and you find that the cost of Microsoft Windows and Office is a big chunk of the total cost.
   
2. You are on a tight budget. You are about to buy a netbook or nettop or even a budget PC or notebook and you find that the cost of Microsoft Windows and Office is a big chunk of the total cost.
3. You want to convert your dual-monitor PC or laptop into a dual-station (also known as dual-seat or dual-terminal) PC. (More about this in a later blog.)
   
4. You have an older PC that has usable hardware life but it doesn't have enough resources for Windows Vista or the forthcoming Windows 7.
   
5. You are a techie and you have decided to switch to Linux.
6. You want to avoid pirated software for legal or ethical reasons, but you can't or don't want to spend a lot of money for software licenses.
7. You have heard a lot of good things about open source and you are motivated to migrate to Linux.
   

Let us assume that you belong to one of the above categories. You have what a Product Manager would call, 'a strong business case'.

"So, why are we wasting time talking about it? Why not jump in?"

But first you have to do some prep work. This will help make this transition a smooth one for you.

Scout Motto: "Be Prepared"

1. Normally you don't directly work with the operating system that much. It is the applications that entertain you, inform you or let you get your work done. Almost all of the open source applications can run on Windows. Pick those applications that you more often use, download the open source versions for Windows and try them out first. At a minimum, you should try out the open source web browser, such as Firefox, and an office application, such as OpenOffice, and any other application that you use a lot.
2. Test drive Linux using one of the following ways:
   
1. The popular Linux distributions are available for download in the form of a Live CD. By booting from the CD, you can test drive Linux without going through an install. However, keep in mind that this will run somewhat slower than the installed version. You will not only get familiar with the new system, but you will also have the opportunity to test hardware compatibility and driver support.
2. Another way of test driving Linux before taking the plunge is to install it as a Windows application. This allows you to avoid making big changes to your system, such as partitioning your hard drive. Also you can uninstall it safely through the Windows Control Panel, like any other Windows application.
3. Also be prepared to do the following or have access to someone who can help you with these:
   
1. Be able to find the right discussion forum and search for answers and post questions, if needed.
2. Be able to search for and download drivers, if needed.
   
3. Be able to open a terminal in Linux and run commands, if needed. You can try this out in your test drive.
   

"OK. I have done the prep work. Now can I go ahead and...?"

Sure, with the business case ready and the prep work done, you can go ahead and install it. Here is what you should expect.

Look before you leap

Although you can download Linux and applications free of charge, please be aware that you may have to spend some money for the following. You may not need any of these, but it is good to keep a small budget to make your transition successful.

1. If you want the software in a CD/DVD, you may have to pay for that and the shipping charges.
2. Documentation is free and bundled with the software download. However, if you need printed manuals, you have to pay.
3. If you need phone or email support for installation, you will have to pay a small fee.
4. If you must have an application that only runs on Windows, such as Adobe Photoshop, you may have to buy that (or use what you already have). In order to run this Windows application on Linux, you may have to buy a connecting software, such as CodeWeavers Crossover, at a modest price.

Take the low risk path

To minimize risk, if you currently have a Windows PC, I recommend installing Linux in dual boot mode. This will allow you to select between Linux and Windows while starting your PC. This way, if you run into an issue on Linux, you will be able to fall back on Windows, until you get that resolved.

I know that I am stating a lot of things here very briefly without providing full justification or supporting data. I hope to drill down into these in forthcoming blogs...soon!

I welcome any and all comments - compliments and criticism alike. If you have "been there, done that" or you are considering open source software on a home PC, your feedback is especially welcome.

Also, I have posted a user poll covering the benefits listed above. If you have migrated to Linux or considering it, take a moment to check the boxes that apply to you. Thanks in advance.

Tags: open source, linux, desktop, opensource