So how big is Open Source in Pakistan? Is there a future for the penguin at the enterprise level? Faraz Khan of Emergen Consulting shares his views on the matter…
What’s the biggest query companies have to deploy OpenSource solutions at the Enterprise level?
The biggest concern in Pakistan, as well as globally, is that of resources. Opensource solutions are inherently made by stitching together many smaller sub-systems. This results in an extremely powerful but quite complicated infrastructure. You require resources with a lot of knowledge and hands-on experience to manage such systems. Proper training on each one of these systems would be equivalent to obtaining a college degree!
We believe that day-to-day management of an OpenSource infrastructure requires extremely capable resources which are hard to find. What is required is a consolidated identity management tool and OpenSource products such as Zivios, which is under active development, aims to fulfill these requirements.
If these solutions are so competent, then why don’t more companies use them?
Clients need to be technically savvy and educated in order to understand the benefits of OpenSource technology. Many IT Managers and executives in the country lack exposure to new age technologies and are apprehensive of OpenSource products. On top of that, lack of required resources make it a hard sell as OpenSource-savvy administrators are hard for the client to find and retain.
How would you suggest the HR angle be dealt with?
Countries in Europe and the United States, the academia and government sector boost OpenSource development as it is equivalent to building knowledge in the society. In Pakistan, the academia and the government are one of the largest proprietary software clients in the country.
Essentially the academia and the government can drastically accelerate OpenSource adoption NOT by conducting trainings or workshops but by deploying systems/infrastructures inhouse that use these technologies. This allows students to have a thorough grasp of the solution, training and experience of real-world scenarios.
Point being that unless there is demand for the skill, supply will remain limited and inferior in quality. Having said that, the acceptance is growing and we are slowly able to hire better resources.
What’s the most common misconception about OpenSource Software?
Customers generally think of OpenSource as the ‘cheap way out’, or worse, technology that is ‘not up to the mark’. The customer in question would opt for a proprietary solution, not realizing that most proprietary offerings in the market are based on technologies developed in the open-source domain. Also, the local tech market is not mature enough to acknowledge that ‘services’ are not cheap. Hence they would refuse to pay money for expert services. By labeling OpenSource solutions as ‘cheap’ the non-tech-savvy managers will not advertise the fact that they run OpenSource (as that becomes a status symbol of sort).
To clarify, a certain large telco that we know of will advertise that “We run Oracle RAC”. That statement is only partially true as they only run Oracle RAC for their customer service database. The more important ‘billing’ database is running off replicated Mysql DBs.
Faraz Khan is the Chief Architect at Emergen Consulting Pvt Ltd based out of Karachi, Pakistan
