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I’ve been seeing a lot more articles lately about how packaged business software is so poorly designed. It’s an age-old complaint, to be sure, but it got me to thinking about the ramifications and ripple effect of the shortcomings of third-party software.

Some organizations don’t have the manpower, in-house skills or desire to develop business applications from the ground-up. In many cases, CIOs feel like they have to settle for a packaged app that appears to meet most of the requirements suggested by end users and business leaders.

But in the end, the software often ends up falling short of user expectations. Certainly a big part of the disconnect occurs somewhere between documenting user requirements and installing the software. Users invariably end up dissatisfied with the functionality and workflow (or lack thereof) with the software and end up using work-arounds to the system.

All of these issues, along with the economic pressures that CIOs are under, have helped to strengthen the open source movement, an alternative to premise and SaaS-based software that continues to become more appealing to a growing number of IT leaders.

BlueStar Energy Services is a prime example. In 2006, the company decided to build an e-commerce and billing engine at the core of its business dubbed NextStar by drawing upon open source technologies. As CTO Tom Keen and his team explained to me, they wanted a system that stripped away the rigidity of the packaged apps they’d been using while designing new functionality and services for their customer base. The Chicago-based energy services provider ended up establishing a design team in Lima, Peru for a fraction of the cost to house and staff a similar group stateside. The $2.5 million-to-$3 million investment BlueStar has made in open source technologies and the Lima development center is reasonable compared to the revenue growth that the NextStar system has made possible.

Granted, BlueStar is only seven years old and doesn’t have the kind of legacy systems baggage that CIOs from more mature companies have to contend with. And while open source isn’t a fit for every situation, it is a viable alternative in many circumstances where IT leaders are increasingly looking for new options.

Comments (3)

	1. 08-17-2009 12:58
	Tom, it's a pretty gutsy move for Tom Keen and his team to undertake such an initiative. I'm wondering whether he had had previous success in an open source project that led him to believe this could be successful? Registered

Mel Duvall

	2. 08-17-2009 13:45
	Keen came over to BlueStar from a consulting firm where he had worked on open source engagements with various clients and saw how the approach could be succesfully applied. Registered

Tom Hoffman

	3. 08-17-2009 15:21
	Very interesting and inspiring article, especially given the time frames involved and the transition to a new technology platform and development team. I am not surprised to that the flavor of open source used is actually commercial open source, given that SpringSource offers subscriptions for its products; this is an increasingly prevalent model (Redhat/JBoss does the same) and in my opinion a smart one. There are a lot of potentially interesting technical details and decisions that underlie this article, such as the decision to move from Cold Fusion to a different Java framework even though ColdFusion (in its later releases) is based on Java and there are other products like ColdSpring that bring the Spring framework to ColdFusion. Registered

Fred Kauber

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