1. Open Source in Big Business: A Consulting Perspective Tom Lee Shine Technologies

2. Overview

Who am I? 3. Our Clients 4. What is a Consultant? 5. Disregard Dogmatism, Acquire Value 6. Selling Big Business on Open Source 7. Why Open Source for Your Clients? 8. Getting Big Business to Give Back 9. On Total Cost of Ownership

10. Who am I?

Senior Consultant forShine Technologies

• Software consultancy with offices in Melbourne and Brisbane 11. http://www.shinetech.com

Open source contributor

• (C)Python, Node, Rails,...

12.

NAB 13. Sensis 14. Loyalty Pacific 15. Lufthansa Technik 16. Others...

Our Clients 17. What is a Consultant? A consultant is a professional whoprovides professional or expert advicein a particular area of expertise. Wikipedia People pay consultants for ouropinions. They payconsultantsbecause they believe ouradvice will translate totangible value. 18. Disregard Dogmatism, Acquire Value We should strive todeliver optimum value to our clients . Open source is part of our toolkit. 19. Selling Big Business on Open Source Most of the timethey ask, or they'realready using it! Usually specific, proven Open Source solutions that aretried and tested. e.g Apache HTTPd, Tomcat, Hudson, Ruby & Rails Proving thatyoucan support these solutions is an excellent start. 20. Selling Big Business on Open Source (cont.) Big business is generallyconservative: opportunities on the bleeding-edge are rare but notentirelyunheard of! Open source allowsgood business relationships to trump proprietary lock-in. 21. Why Open Source for Your Clients? Proprietary solutionsoften limit your client's options for support. What happens if a business falls out with a proprietary vendor? Who will support the solution? Initial outlayfor open source is typically less than for proprietary solutions. Benefit fromfeatures and bug-fixesdelivered for free by the community. 22. Why Open Source for Your Clients? (cont.) Only thelicense and (lack of) access to the source code prevents your consultancy from supporting proprietary solutions. Is a vendor of proprietary softwarereally more technically capablethan anybody else with access to the source? 23. Getting Big Business to Give Back Your clients may be a little nervous about you contributing fixes upstream . Convince them of thebenefitsof giving back. Go ahead andcreate useful open sourcefor your clients. e.g. jazz node template engine http://github.com/shinetech/jazz Jazz is in active use by the CitySearch team atSensis http://www.citysearch.com.au 24. Getting Big Business to Give Back (cont.) Convincing your clients to give back benefits everyone. The Open Source projectcontinues to grow . Simplifies the upgrade pathfor your client. Gets your company name out there . 25. On Total Cost of Ownership Lots of talk regarding Open Source vs. proprietary on TCO, butit's pointless to generalize. For any given problem, thedifference between the TCOof open source and proprietary solutions can and will differ due to any number of factors. 26. Summary

Focus on deliveringvalueto your clients. 27. Be understanding of corporate technological conservatism. 28. This is RL: don't get caught up in dogma.

29. Questions? Tom Lee http://tomlee.co Shine Technologies http://www.shinetech.com [email_address]