In most markets it’s clear, as 2012 dawns, that there are usually two strong players.
A proprietary company and open source.
Windows and open source applications. The iPhone and Android. In each case open source has come up the stack, closer to the point of market control.
This year we’ll find that control has been achieved. With the cloud. Because if 2012 is the year of the enterprise cloud, it’s also the year of open source’s final triumph.
Clouds are the first secular change in enterprise technology born after open source. Big companies have had a decade to grow accustomed to open source economics. They like what they see. They’re not going to give all that up for something called “cloud” if it doesn’t give them the control and cost visibility they’ve just started to obtain. They’re not going to be fooled, they’re not going to surrender, just because their biggest vendors say they should.
If companies are going to move into clouds they want more than mere cost savings. They want something better. And when open source is at the heart of the cloud, that’s what they get.
Open source offers enterprises both control and the cooperation of their peers. When there’s a storm in their cloud, and they need help stat, they know a community will come to their rescue much faster than any single vendor, no matter how large, can. Between their own efforts and those of the communities they’ve joined, they see more surety than in any Service Level Agreement you can write.
They’re correct in that.
A lot of people are going to talk about “lock-in” with the cloud. There is natural lock-in. Just as switching between Microsoft and Apple gets more-and-more costly the longer you linger in the PC world, so switching between cloud vendors, or cloud stacks, gets more expensive as you use them.
CIOs aren’t stupid. They are going to do everything possible to minimize this. So they’re going slowly and carefully, first moving some customer-facing applications to public clouds, then looking carefully at their own assets, and only committing to projects involving “precious bodily fluids” when they’re certain the lock-in is minimal, and their own control optimal.
That’s what open source in the cloud gives you. That’s the value. You have control, and you’re also not alone. In a complex, uncertain world, that comfort of community is what CIOs will demand as the price of moving into clouds – whether public, private or hybrid.
So if 2012 is the year when the IT center moves into the cloud, it’s also the year when the IT center moves, more than ever, into open source.
