Unlocking The Future: Open Source Opportunities In Custom Systems

Custom system builders are among the specialists able to embrace open source as a new prospect for success. Linux's emergence as a completely viable open source operating system has attracted many start-ups on a budget, in addition to a growing recognition by proprietary vendors (and their enterprise and SMB clients) of the benefits of open solutions. The inherent adaptability of open software sets the stage for custom builders to take advantage of cost-saving opportunities.

Microsoft's name brand dominance, however, still plays a limiting factor, and breakthroughs in vertical markets remain marginal.

"As far as going out and promoting open source for the broad base channel, the reality is the 90-odd percent of the industry buying and selling PCs want Microsoft on it," said Steve Maser, director of product development and marketing at Seneca Data, a custom system builder based in North Syracuse, N.Y. "There is a known user interface in Microsoft—they know common error codes; they don't get freaked out."

Where Maser sees opportunities for open source at Seneca is in the desire for customers to load operating systems based on Linux or Red Hat Inc.. "What we're starting to see customers coming to us to provide the installation we provide on the Microsoft side on the Linux side," he said. "Several customers are coming to us looking for the latest and greatest version of Red Hat, because they want the support—typically the issue with open source is not the writing and building out of code; a lot of it is about support."

When dealing with open source products that Maser says might not yet run on bleeding-edge hardware, custom builders need to be ready for any interoperability or performance problems open source software might create. "Trying to accommodate everyone's requests is very difficult to do," he said. "There is a lot of compatibility issues, so you need to do your homework up front."

For Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and the open source community, the benefits open source provides custom system builders are clear. "The economics of using open source technology to build a custom solution is totally obvious, right? It's free," he said. "That really translates into more profit for the VAR because they can sell the product and service at a lower cost because their cost without high license fees are lower."

He said any concern about Linux or other open source software being perceived as "unstable" or lacking confidence from the enterprise industry has largely dissipated. "Do many of the people buying boxes even know or care if it's proprietary?" he asked. "They just want a solution that works." Zemlin said it's hard to overstate how pervasive open source products are in the technology market, even if many aren't even aware of the trend. "Cisco's entire Linksys product line is built on Linux," he points out. "You just don't see it marketed necessarily as Linux."

Todd Swank, director of marketing at Burnsville, Minn.-based custom builder Nor-Tech said he believes opportunities for custom system builders exist within the high-performance computing (HPC) space. "The primary opportunity we've seen is in HPC clusters, where that segment is dominated by open source," he said. "They tend to prefer clean code, a very light code [that] won't get in the way of the calculations they want to perform."

Those clients exist mostly at the enterprise level and consist of customers with their own IT staff and their own Linux programmers on staff, Swank said. "You always think, 'Oh, people with no money want open source,'" he said. "But if you're a business looking for a real application, you need to have somebody who can make that work, so you're going to go with Microsoft or hire someone [who knows] how to support that open source format for you."

Swank said Microsoft has the kind of resources available that allow Nor-Tech to build their custom systems business, he said. The training, advertising support and technical support they can provide allows Nor-Tech to spend time focusing on the solution and not worry about the interoperability and stability issues often associated with open source-based custom systems. "For small companies like us, it's very beneficial," he said. "In the open source community, you're kind of on your own."

Like Maser, for Swank and his customers it comes down to a reliability and trust issue. "Open source works in certain aspects but a business doesn't want to spend all day long figuring out how to get their applications to talk to each other. They want it to work," he said. "Just because the code is free doesn't mean the people who know how to support it work for free, or even cheaply. In effect, you may be paying more than people skilled on the Microsoft programs."

Next: Great Future For Open Source Applications