Opensource & Enterprise System

I was in a conversation with a leading expert in the content management space yesterday and both of us agreed that the awareness levels of opensource in content management /portal space is going up .Content/Portal management systems are important for two reasons – they are perhaps the lightest of enterprise systems and owing to its nature its reach and usage is perhaps the highest – success/failure can be assessed by a cross-section of people using the system for a myriad purposes. I had earlier written about liferay -opensource portal. JBoss Alfresco are getting more active. Forrester believes after that the open source market for WCM is not yet mature enough to address large enterprises' highly sophisticated WCM requirements. The report rightly highlights that some of the open source WCM solutions currently available on the market are WYSIWYG - "what you see is what you get" - enable versioning, and can support RSS feeds and blogs. However, some of the latest open source WCM releases don't include basics like drag-and-drop environments, picture resizing, or spell-checking functions. There is still a long way to go before open source WCM projects can address more sophisticated needs, such as multimedia coverage and multichannel delivery - both of which will soon be must-have functionalities. Media houses just don't have the time to wait for open source WCM solutions to be ready. The market has already moved on to audio, video, and mobile news coverage & more importantly the report righly stresses on the need to evaluate opensource solutions as rigorously as that of commercial vendors. I had earlier written that opensource may not be ready for enterprise applications space.Open source solutions at the bottom of the stack – typically workhorse infrastructure elements are getting well entrenched – but even a layer above – lets say starting even at database level – we see the hold loosening and as we move up certainly – opensource becomes one among multiple options. I tend to take a dim view of open source relevance - see Open source -where is the business model, Open Source : Reality Check. We also recently covered Kim Polese view business models of the open source support companies – where the contours of what need to be done to support open source components become quite clear and a not seeing several players in the opensource world thinking along these lines – it would be a major impediment to consider adoption of opensource in enterprises if the support model is not made widely available and the economics and technology upgrade rate demonstrated as beneficial