A clear vision on open source

David Allinson, General Manager of Opennet MEA, lifts the lid on new opportunities for Middle East CIOs.

There's a love affair brewing between enterprises and open source in the Middle East. After flying below the radar for several years, open source solutions are slowly but surely gaining altitude as the community discovers that open source solutions present incomparable benefits over proprietary software and hardware, including better customisation and integration services.

Open source makes sense. More so today, thanks in part to the economic downturn the global market is currently facing. There are opportunities for CIOs to not only carve out costs from their IT infrastructure but also deliver performance and results. In addition, Linux, the premier flavour of open source, has a whole lot going for it that proprietary solutions don't. It's a stable environment. If that's not enough, it turns out the Linux market worldwide is growing rapidly as more and more Linux servers are deployed in an increasing variety of enterprise-wide projects.

Virtual reality
With enterprises increasingly looking at data centre consolidation as one path to achieving cost reduction, virtualisation is one technology that is coming into its own. With the added benefit of being able to reduce the cost of desktop consumption and refresh costs through virtualisation, CIOs are looking to open source experts like Red Hat for a clear virtualisation strategy. Virtualisation technology delivers a quantum leap in IT operational flexibility, speed of deployment and reduced capital expenditure. It delivers more to its users while CIOs gain increased control over their costs. Virtualisation enables enterprises to run multiple operating system 'instances' or 'guests' on a single physical system. It isolates the complete operating system and application stack from the hardware, increasing operational flexibility and improving resource utilisation. 

With virtualisation, processing and data resources servers and storage are logically grouped into a single resource pool. Virtual servers and storage can then be dynamically allocated in a few seconds. Red Hat is a major contributor to open source virtualisation projects (including Xen and KVM). While virtualisation helps customers reduce cost, increasingly, management tools play a central role to unlocking a customer's IT budget. Not all customers want to spend money in order to save money, but ultimately if the added value is there, then the project goes ahead. The combination of virtualisation and management tools into an open source stack alongside middleware, databases and applications is delivering value to customers even in a budget constrained environment.

Building blocks
With open source, enterprises can now build business applications using open source solutions. Solution providers could use Oracle on RHEL, SAP on RHEL, develop core banking applications on RHEL and JBoss, develop Microsoft Exchange alternatives using Zimbra and RHEL, and so on. These open source offerings provide key features such as hot back-up, active-passive high availability, on-line table and index reorganisation, security auditing, database partitioning, and parallel query execution, among several other business-critical features.

In a region where a large percentage of enterprises fall into the small to medium enterprise level (from 25 to 200 users), Opennet MEA, as Red Hat's main distributor and authorised certified training centre, recently extended the availability of new open source support packages targeted specifically at this sector. These packages, available at different levels, include support for as few as four servers, phone and email support, dedicated technical account manager, scheduled visits including workshops, knowledge transfer and technical presentations, incident visits, and training on the essentials at the system administration level with the option to earn RHCT (Red Hat Certified Technician) certification. These offerings will enable such companies to adopt open source solutions with back up support from a specialist support organisation, allowing them to reap the benefits of open source with confidence.

To learn more about the open source alternative for your enterprise in the first instance please email david@opennet.ae.

David Allinson joined Opennet MEA as its General Manager in April 2007 and is responsible for re-organising the company's Middle East operations. David brings with him over 25 years' experience in growing and developing businesses, as well as creating winning strategies to strengthen their position in their individual market segments.