Open source Vs non critical applications

For the critical applications of a portfolio, you usually have a clear strategy at short, medium and long term. Clear strategy and probably an assigned budget aligned with the needs.

For those non-critical applications you have in the portfolio the solution is not always good, standard, cheap or simple.

You probably have a set of different applications for different purposes that were created or bought to cover a business process as necessary as others, but that was out of this set of key applications that have assigned budget.

A lot of people face this scenario.

Now a cheap alternative seems to be possible with the open source solutions. You can find proven open source applications that covers all these functionalities in a standard way:

• Covering standard processes (ITIL, SAS 70),
• Offering a set of standard end user features (),
• Web 2.0 based,
• That you can adapt to different environments

Virtual environments help on the use of these applications due to the TCO of an environment just for an unique application has been reduced a lot.

Is this a good strategy?

I don’t know, but since the IT budgets has been reduced during these 2 years but business needs continue there, and this alternative is at least a valid interim solution.