Open source: driving the future of business success – ETCIO.com

By Maneesh Sharma

The ongoing pandemic has accelerated the move to digital across geographies, businesses and income groups. Businesses are quickly realizing that their move to digital is in need for some speed. Not surprisingly, the reality for businesses today is to build software in a way thats scalable, fast and secure.

The case for software is hardly a new one in fact, it is on the back of software that smaller companies with a great idea have been able to take on, and in many cases, outpace global behemoths. Theyve been able to do so because they invested in building applications that are efficient, reliable, secure, scalable and therefore, can adapt fast to changing business demands. Start-ups like Slack, Airbnb and Uber have all been born out of a good idea and great software.

The promise of open source

Open source is an enabler of innovation and has been recognised by organisations as the fastest way to build software that is reliable, scalable and secure. Open source software development benefits greatly from the fact that it is largely a community effort.

Instead of starting from scratch, developers can simply turn towards the community to look for code that is already available, build on it and accelerate the time to develop and deploy. By doing so, open source has revolutionized software development, and created an interconnected community of developers that is deeply collaborative and extends across the globe. In fact, today, 99% of software projects are developed using open source.

This culture of collaborative software development is birthing a new breed of innovative companies that give back to open source as much, if not more, than they consume it themselves, enabling any organisation to stand on the shoulders of giants by building on leading edge software projects developed by the best.

Making the enterprise more open and secure

One of the biggest challenges that business and technology leaders face is how they can make their IT agile enough to respond to a dynamic business environment. For most organizations in India today, the process of software development is still largely a traditional one IT has to go through the painfully linear cycle of planning, provisioning, testing, deployment and maintenance before it can actually respond to the business need.

As weve all seen first-hand in these last few months, speed (or lack of) can be a major dampener business environments seldom come with the luxury of time, in the absence of which, customers quickly jump to the next available option. This is an overhead that organizations simply cannot afford.

The promise of the open source culture of collaborative software development is exactly this: it is fast, scalable and, by bringing the same working practices within the organizations firewall (a practice called innersourcing), more efficient. By building on existing code, and focusing on solving new challenges, reducing duplicate efforts, breaking down barriers and achieving faster collaboration, teams can share skills and ideas across the entire organisation and drive innovation at speed.

In addition to scalability, open source also offers a secure environment to create code using tools and processes that allow businesses to code securely and fix vulnerabilities when they are discovered - helping minimise vulnerable targets, and thus making hacking more difficult and less profitable. Eventually, a safe and healthy open source community isnt just good for open source, it benefits the millions of critical technologies that depend on it.

Embracing a culture of collaboration

As individuals with diverse skill sets contribute to projects with their ideas and best practices, this also creates a work environment that induces collaboration and fosters innovation.

This cultural shift within the organisation creates an environment where creative thinking is encouraged and innovation becomes a reality - leading to better technology solutions and more fulfilled teams. For business and technology leaders, it takes away the administrative overhead of provisioning dedicated resources to create and manage walled gardens within the enterprise, making IT far more secure, agile and cost-effective.

Tapping into the talent

By connecting with the community, enterprises can access a pool of global talent, making it easier for the enterprise to tap into a wide set of skills as well as recruit and retain the best talent, that will help them succeed in their innovation journey. Organisations that attract the best developer talent will be better placed to excel at transformation initiatives.

It is clear that open source is here to stay. Intrinsically, the idea of collaborative development is as old as time. Today, technology and open source make it possible to collaborate meaningfully, within a framework that is secure, reliable, and in a way that not only protects an organizations competitive advantage, but also enhances it. The businesses of the future will be those that recognize and embrace this.

The author is Country Manager, GitHub India

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Open source: driving the future of business success - ETCIO.com