Even as Indian telecom companies continue to add subscribers at a fast pace, the increased competitive scenario is enforcing new demands on telecom service providers. Telecom service providers now not only have to provide the most cost-effective rates, but also have to innovate to quickly rollout new services. Any plan to rollout a new service calls for balancing high capital expenditure with the flexibility and agility of a technology platform that allows a telecom service provider to do so.

Globally, an increasing number of telecom service providers are looking at open source software — as it not only reduces the overall cost of ownership, but also gives them the ability to customize and innovate in a better way, giving them access to the source code.

In India, Reliance Communications has taken the lead, and has adopted a holistic open source strategy. The firm has been making extensive use of open source software in place of proprietary products to promote open standards and facilitate plug and play in IT operations.

Explaining the strategic intent of adopting open source, Alpna Doshi, CIO, Reliance Communications, emphasizes that the company has traditionally been actively engaged with the open source community both as a consumer, as well as a contributor.

“Reliance Communications is required to maintain a large IT infrastructure — both at data center and user desk side — to meet its business requirements. To manage operations of the scale, it is essential to standardize the technology stack. We opted for open standards so that we can benefit from the huge talent pool in the open source ecosystem, while contributing to it simultaneously.”

Addressing change management

Reliance Communications’ open source journey started two years ago, and is perhaps one of the best examples to show how a company can embrace the technology. Acknowledging the fact that adoption of open source could have technical and cultural challenges, the firm followed and showcased best practices of change management to identify and mitigate the envisaged risks of the transition. All stakeholders were taken into confidence before the actual cut over, which has resulted in reduced end-user issues.

Additionally, the firm took a number of initiatives to popularize and increase acceptance of client side open source software among end users. It conducted a number of face-to-face and web training sessions on open source, promoting the benefits of using open source through screen savers, posters, and in-house campaigns. FAQs were created and circulated to all users. To ensure proper support, the IT helpdesk and engineers were trained extensively.

A forum including chat support was created that enabled the users to raise their queries, which were replied by experts. Open source champions were created on each floor and certified. These champions then trained other users.

Classifying applications

In the next stage, key areas of operation were evaluated for their suitability of deploying open source software. The key areas identified were: client side software (Desktop operating system, mail client, office suite, virtual desktop and project management tools), Data Center Applications (Sever OS, proxy software and other intranet applications like FTP, DHCP, DNS, file server, print servers), Network Management System (NMS) to remotely monitor and manage network links and devices, and web hosting applications for internal and external websites.

The choice for using open source software for user machines was made at a much more granular level. Instead of identifying functions, the role of each individual employee was evaluated with a perspective of suitability to proprietary software versus open source ones. The Standard Operating Environment (SOE) image carried only open source software. Exceptions were made for a few users, having exceptional requirements.

For a large company like Reliance Communications, the biggest deployment of open source was on the client side. The firm chose OpenOffice, as the office suite and Thunderbird as the open source mailing client. Ubuntu OS was tested for its compatibility with all applications used in the company. Similarly, OpenProj was used by users involved in project management and tracking, while Ulteo was evaluated as a platform for virtual desktops. Among these projects, the biggest challenge was the deployment of OpenOffice.

“Adoption to OpenOffice was a big challenge as there was huge inertia from both users and businesses. Businesses were requested to identify users for whom the use of OpenOffice usage was not practical. For the remaining users running in thousands, OpenOffice was deployed using Marimba,” states Doshi. Open source solution, ‘Scalix’ was implemented on the server side coupled with open source mail client Thunderbird. The firm was able to improve hardware efficiency by using these light-weight applications.

On the data center side, various flavors of Linux were being used for Server OS like RHEL, Fedora, OEL and Cent. Choice of OS was determined by compatibility with other software. Today, use of Linux OS has been well accepted for business critical applications with adequate level of support available for enterprise grade versions. The firm also maintains several open source proxies for Internet access to thousands of internal users. The proxy is well hardened and allows communication only on selective ports to preclude malicious attacks. URL and content filtering is also followed. Users are segmented based on their Internet usage requirements.

The choice of software in the data center was made by evaluating the software on parameters of features, scalability, manageability, availability of skills in the market and compatibility with other software.

Further, open source NMS has been configured for several thousands of links and devices. “We have developed additional features to these open source plug-ins which make it suitable for our business requirements, as well as makes the product more enriched. Extensive use of online forums was made to seek help in development, as well as contribute to the forum. We also customized it to create a Business Process Management (BPM) incorporating all devices such as servers, links and network devices for mission-critical services. In case of failure, alerts are sent to all stakeholders,” explains Doshi. A huge number of web applications were hosted on open source platforms like JBoss.

Open source – not a cost arbitrage issue

What’s more noteworthy about Reliance Communications’ strategy is the fact that the organization’s open source strategy has not revolved around cost, but around flexibility and innovation. “While cost saving can be an added advantage, our prime focus is on propagation of open standards across the organization, which we believe is the way forward for enterprise as well as desktop applications. There have been instances where we have invested heavily on training and migration to adopt open standards,” states Doshi.

Due to its focus on open source, the firm believes that in the next few years, Reliance Communications would derive multiple benefits of open standards like collaborative development, access to innovations and agility.

“With advances in IT, the advantages of large, monolithic, proprietary applications will break down against the storm of innovation brought by open source community products. The ecosystem of enterprise support for open source application is also developing rapidly and is reducing the traditional risks associated with open source adoption in enterprises. Industry initiatives like ‘Wholesale Application Community’ (WAC), is a testimony to the fact that open source coupled with open standard platforms is going to be the hub of future innovation,” says Doshi.

For an industry grappling with falling margins and increased competition, the large scale adoption of open source is a pioneering move, as it can improve the overall competitiveness of the company.