Historically, consultants played a big role in the commoditization of IT, giving many users the confidence to move away from proprietary hardware made by the likes of IBM to cheaper Unix and PC-based systems. The order-of-magnitude cost savings more than justified the consultancy fees and the stranglehold of proprietary hardware architectures was broken forever.
One might have thought that consultants would be looking to repeat the story, only this time with proprietary software vendors as the target. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be happening: major consultancy firms seem to be happy with the status quo, and are more likely to use their intellectual muscle to rubbish open source solutions than to explore the possibilities.
It’s a situation that puzzles Mark Taylor,executive director of the Open Source Consortium.
"I’m amazed," he says. “The big consultancies should be all over it and if they are not then the existing consultancies will be.”
Taylor says that there are a number of “cognitive barriers” to people accepting open source software, not least of which is understanding how anyone makes any money out of it. In fact, there are a number of viable business models, but the one that should interest consultancies revolves around the far more lucrative supply of services and support.
“Open source isn’t a threat for consultants and consultancies, but represents a significant opportunity,” says Taylor. “The open source phenomenon is a natural corollary to commodity hardware--the future is in the services. Open source is often talked about as if it was an entire stranger to the rest of the software world. In terms of the services that are wrapped around it it’s the same—you need good business process management, good project management skills and so on.”
Many businesses don’t understand where the support for open source systems comes from and part of the OSC’s remit is filling that gap. Representing most of the open source players in the country, it is also putting together open source consortia to bid for public sector projects.
Ironically, one of the few big players that is getting behind open source is IBM itself. There may be some element of sour grapes here, in that a future triumph of open source systems would pay back a number of old scores. But it may also be the case that IBM’s previous bruising experiences in trying to preserve its own proprietary territory, compared to its stellar success in the services and consultancy space, have taught it some valuable lessons about where the value lies in its market. But the rest of the consultancy industry seems slow to follow.
“Some consultancies are starting to tentatively act on it but most of them don’t really get it yet,” says Taylor. “I think they’re reticent and that’s a mistake—there’s a danger of being outflanked by an emerging consulting industry that’s fully adjusted to open source.”
While some consultants acknowledge that open source may have a role to play at the infrastructure level, the idea that open source products could take over at the middleware and application level seems to stretch credibility.
“All paradigms change,” says Taylor. “A million secretaries screamed when we took WordPerfect 5.1 away from them. Open source produces its own 'category killers’. Open Office will at some point scream past Microsoft Office.”
These category killers have emerged most rapidly in the internet arena—the Firefox browser and Apache Web server being just two examples. Proprietary software provides a comfort zone for many people, but as Taylor is keen to point out, it isn’t necessarily that comfortable: “You try to get support for Win NT nowadays,” he says. Look at (financial software product) Quicken, which was arbitrarily and rather suddenly discontinued. People should be very concerned with proprietary software, they can and do pull the plug at a moment's notice.”
Taylor believes that open systems can work at any level and that consultancies should get behind it.
“Consultancies have got almost all of the resources they need,” he says, pointing out that open source has strong government backing. “The main thing is to understand where open source is coming from.”
Entire contents, Copyright © 2005 Consultant-News.com. All rights reserved.
