Insights
IT automation - Improving speed, agility, and productivity with open source solutions and strategy
Highlights:
IT automation is a decisive step toward advancing the efficiency of any company. With fewer resources wasted on mindless busywork, the employees can divert their energy toward the forward-thinking initiative. Open source is the way forward for enterprises that are on the lookout for smart, agile automation solutions that put them on the road to progress and prosperity. Parkar with its NexGen platform helps such enterprises transition to open source with strategies and solutions that are sustainable for every architecture and environment.
The first choice of DevOps
DevOps teams absolutely rely on open source for agility and capability. Open source and DevOps in that sense are inseparable. Explains Chris Short, principal product manager for Red Hat Ansible, “Open source software and the processes and tooling around it are what necessitated the birth of agile and DevOps. Having the ability to edit and share code in real-time with the rest of the world (or only your internal teams) can be a significant productivity boost.
The folks working in these spaces are force multipliers in the right conditions. They focus on the tasks that solve the next series of problems the organization will face.”
With the power of open-source, IT teams find themselves more equipped to learn, automate and tackle new challenges faster than ever. Enterprises are keeping up with this increasing velocity of change by embracing agile practices. The landscape is dynamic and a lot that we are achieving today is impossible to imagine in a closed source world.
The majority of the middleware and development tools out there is open source. With DevOps and agile practices gaining momentum, the spotlight now is undoubtedly on open source.
A recently released Red Hat 2020 enterprise open source report where 1000 enterprise leaders participated has some great stats.
Most felt that the top benefit of having it was higher quality software.
In this context, Red Hat’s 2019 survey findings are interesting too. According to the survey, 55% of respondents’ software was still proprietary and in a couple of years expected it to be down to 32%. 33% felt open-source software was so much better than proprietary.
Be it for their operating system, middleware or cloud needs, enterprises think open source solutions offer the perfect fit.
Outlined below are the top 7 reasons why open source is a must-have for ambitious enterprises:
Productivity
Solving complex problems necessitates a whole lot of flexibility for developers and test engineers that are very rare to find in commercial tools. Open source enjoys access to a vast pool of practitioners who share good practices and code. In a DevOps world where different teams come together for multiple projects that are often tight on time and budget, open-source solutions that offer free and flexible resources make a huge difference. It’s just what enterprises need to boost their productivity. The faster resolution gives teams the edge to overcome limitations in their software development cycles that are posed by traditional commercial tools. Also, the fact that teams do not have to struggle with software licenses is an added advantage that’s missing in the case of commercial tools. This ensures better collaboration as all they need to do is download a free repository online and proceed to work immediately.Independence
At the end of the day, enterprises want their DevOps teams to have autonomy and feel empowered enough to explore and experiment. With open source solutions, this becomes easily possible no matter what they are doing – whether integrating tools to build a toolchain or using open source components in their applications.Cost-effectiveness
All those who are using open source solutions cannot stop raving about its cost-effectiveness in the modern software development scenario. Open source is ubiquitous – whether you are writing software to deploy it or already running software and supporting it. As compared to proprietary solutions, open-source ones are less expensive and more competent. The biggest advantage is that they allow all enterprises to start small and scale up with time. This works incredibly well for enterprises that are budget-challenged (almost all enterprises work on tight budgets). Using open source solutions that allow them to start small with community versions and then migrate to commercially-supported ones makes financial sense.Flexibility
Agile and adaptive automation is just what we need for a flexible software development environment. Open source solutions make plugins and APIs easily available to enterprises to build custom pipelines for specific resources and requirements. This, in turn, helps them build their own suites rather than depending on those being offered by a single vendor. Open source in that sense works for vendors as well as organizations. While organizations get to deliver software and how they need it, open-source help vendors deliver flexible solutions. Basically, what an open-source strategy does is that it offers organizations multiple ways to deal with problems. It, therefore, keeps it from being blocked due to the unavailability of a particular tool or capability from a vendor and empowers it to build it on its own. Whether it is for building a project or a platform or testing feasibility or developing new skills, open source provides the much-needed agility and flexibility to do what you want.Adaptability
While high flexibility and cost-benefit are important reasons to choose open source, enterprises go the open source way for its unmatched adaptability too. So when low-cost, closed source, third party solutions give you basic functionality, open-source allows you to branch the source code and make changes that are aligned with the project you are working on. So rather than being content with what the vendor gives, teams have the option of writing such code on their own to match the exact needs of customers or projects.Better workflow
When it comes to inner-sourcing, an open-source strategy can save enterprises a lot of work. Teams are familiar with the ‘wait’ states they often detest wherein they are left waiting for others to approve or make a change because the application is owned by a different team. Rather than waiting for those teams to assign resources and priority to do so, it is easier to let teams first complete the task and then use a Git pull request to have the code change approved by the team that owns it. Open source, thus, allows teams to add value in an expedited manner and improve overall efficiency.Security
Open source has often been appreciated for its solid information security. Besides, the open-source community is extremely responsive which is critical for the challenging environment we live in. This has, in turn, helped address security concerns early on and fix problems as soon as they become apparent.Lower maintenance cost
Rather than writing an application and sustaining it yourself, open-source makes it possible to share the cost of maintenance among multiple parties. This is possible due to the community involvement open sources allows its users. These 7 points are so crucial, hereby reiterating the 7 reasons why open source is a must-have for an ambitious project.Is open source strategy ideal for you?
Whether the open source is a good fit for your organization or not will depend on multiple things. First, you need to identify what problems you are trying to solve and the opportunities you are vying through this transition.
You need to consider open source solutions available to you. We at Parkar, for instance, have been leveraging Red Hat solutions with incredible success and strongly recommend it.
Our open-source NexGen platform offers you complete support and capability for your goals. You will also have to determine how sustainable the transition to open source is going to be.
Open source is the way forward for enterprises that are on the lookout for smart, agile automation solutions that put them on the road to progress and prosperity. Parkar with its NexGen platform helps such enterprises transition to open source with strategies and solutions that are sustainable for every architecture and environment.
If you think you are ready for open-source or want to know if open source is for you, allow us to help you take the leap. Call us today or request a demo. Let’s begin the conversation on new opportunities for 2020.
About Parkar Digital
Parkar Digital, a Gold Certified Microsoft Azure partner, provides technology solutions for Digital Healthcare, Digital Retail & CPG. Our solutions are powered by the Parkar platforms built using Cloud, Opensource, and Customer experience technologies. Our goal is to empower a customer-first approach with digital technologies to deliver human-centric solutions for the clients.
THE AUTHOR
Amit Gandhi
As the Co-Founder and CTO for Parkar Digital, Amit leads the Technology and Engineering teams and is responsible for designing and implementing innovative technology solutions for clients across various industries.
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Parkar Digital is a digital transformation and software engineering company headquartered in Atlanta, USA, and has engineering teams across India, Singapore, Dubai, and Latin America.