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The last blog I posted focused on continuing complaints by customers (and pundits) about how packaged business software is so poorly designed. Even when third-party software has been customized, it rarely meets all customer needs. I went on to press the case for open source software (OSS) as an alternative for enterprise customers to consider in addition to packaged apps, homegrown software and Software-as-a-Service.
After considering this a bit further, it seems to me that a business case could be made for enterprise software vendors to become more involved in utilizing open source as part of their own development efforts. Vendors already have different feedback loops for capturing customer feedback on new applications or upgrades to existing systems, such as Alpha testing and customer councils.
The shortcomings with these types of feedback loops is that they’re typically limited to small groups of prospective customers and they fail to provide a more complete approach to gathering requirements and other ideas about functionality and usability traits.
In fairness, most enterprise software vendors have taken at least some steps towards participating in the open source movement. For instance, Oracle last week introduced an open source graphical utility called Oracle VM Template that’s designed for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and software developers to use Oracle Enterprise Linux Just enough OS (JeOS)-based scripts for developing pre-packaged virtual machines for Oracle VM.
Meanwhile, IBM recently introduced an open source machine learning compiler called Milepost GCC that’s aimed at helping software developers to “intelligently” optimize applications and shorten software development times. In June, SAP announced that it’s planning to take a more active role in the Eclipse Foundation while Microsoft has also become more active in the open source community.
It would be naïve to expect big commercial software houses to completely rip-and-replace their existing requirements-gathering models with open source-generated techniques. But OSS continues to become an increasingly popular alternative with enterprise customers who are looking for cost-effective ways of meeting their targeted development needs, according to a new report from IDC. Surely there’s a place for OSS in the feedback loop that software vendors can be utilizing in their interactions with customers.
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