With shrinking IT budgets and growing scale of the IT infrastructure, a rising number of CIOs are looking at open source solutions as a viable alternative. Today, the open source ecosystem is quite mature and offers a number of attractive alternatives for CIOs to save operational costs. As many of these open source infrastructure management tools have many of the same capabilities that their commercial proprietary counterparts offer, they are being actively considered by many CIOs in India.

India’s largest integrated stainless steel manufacturer uses open source infrastructure management tool, Nagios, to manage an IT landscape that consists of over hundred servers, 2500 desktops, 50 network printers and 20 Wi-Fi devices. With the implementation of Nagios, the IT team has the capability to monitor applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, system metrics and infrastructure components with a single tool. Fast detection of infrastructure outages are made possible as alerts can be delivered to technical staff via e-mail or SMS. Escalation capabilities ensure alert notifications reach the right people.

“On an average, the bare minimum software license cost for managing a desktop is Rs 600. For an organization with 300 desktops, this works out to Rs 1.8 lakh per month"

Manoj Chandiramani, President and CEO, SAIMAA Global Solutions

Cost is perhaps the biggest motivator as organizations can save huge costs with respect to licenses. In the case of JSL, the implementation costs have been limited to the procurement of a server and modem – which works out to Rs 10 lakh. A comparative commercial system would have easily cost the company a minimum of Rs 40 lakh.

Manoj Chandiramani, who was earlier a CIO with MF Global, and is now President and CEO, SAIMAA Global Solutions, explains the mathematics. “On an average, the bare minimum software license cost for managing a desktop is Rs 600. For an organization with 300 desktops, this works out to Rs 1.8 lakh per month. If you add the server and network components, the costs go up exponentially,” explains Chandiramani. For large organizations with thousands of servers and network components, the infrastructure management costs only due to licenses can be upwards of Rs 50 lakh per year.

While lower costs continue to remain a big attraction for adoption of open source solutions, what has also swung the tide in the favor of open source is the rising number of firms who offer professional support services. The icing on the cake is the fact that professional support services are provided by most of the open source companies that have created the open source product or platform.

"Open source tools are also a viable means to help reduce software licensing costs which are probably the single largest cost for most IT capex budgets in an enterprise"

Noel Thomas, VP - IT & CISO, Integreon

Some CIOs are also looking at open source solutions as an alternative vendor strategy. “We wanted an alternate licensing strategy against going with the normal strategy of choosing a traditional software vendor. Open source tools are also a viable means to help reduce software licensing costs which are probably the single largest cost for most IT capex budgets in an enterprise,” says Noel Thomas, VP - IT & CISO, Integreon.

Besides lower costs, customization is a big attraction. For example, InfoAxon Technologies, which calls itself India’s first open source integration company, uses Nagios to monitor the health of its servers and proactively manage the availability of mission critical business applications for its customers. The firm chose Nagios as it wanted a tool which was easy to configure and did not have a complex and heavy footprint.

Hence, as open source tools are maturing with active help from the community, CIOs are using this opportunity to customize open source tools to suit their unique requirements.  “In the case of open source, we select the features required by us and not what the product offers. Moreover, if you have an internal IT team, than the same can be implemented without any cost,” points out Balwant Singh, Head-IT, Indo Asian Fusegear.  The firm is using Nagios and ntop and is also exploring OSSIM (Open Source Security Information Management). Using open source solutions, the firm is monitoring 50 servers in addition to routers, Wi-Fi devices, print servers and IP Cameras.

The ability to customize and innovate is a big draw for system integrators and service providers as they can add features according to business requirements.

“We have enhanced Nagios and written our own monitoring agents for monitoring processes and integrated it with an SMS engine for automated alerts on mobiles. We have also integrated Nagios with other open source BI framework for complex data analysis and visualization. This has helped us in providing SLA based support and maintenance services to our customers,” explains Sanjib Dey, OSS Infrastructure Head, InfoAxon Technologies. The firm is currently monitoring 25 servers for overseas customers using Nagios.