| Jan 12, 2016

3 MIN READ

Open Source Business

Business trends from 2015!

As we are entering the new year, I would like to stop for a while and look back at the last year and capture some of the business trends that we are seeing in the market –

1. Open Source is no longer optional

Gone are the days where businesses used to look at open source technologies with suspicion. Thanks to strong open source communities, strong open source based enterprises and strong products based on those. More importantly, these open source technologies are now getting well recognized by Gartner and the likes. This has created a strong atmosphere of confidence about open source technologies. As we saw in CY 2015, many businesses have started adopting Open source based technologies for critical and non-critical workloads. Yes, we need to educate them. Yes, we need to boost their confidence through some hand-holding. But the businesses powered by strong visionary leadership are ready to take this path and are better prepared to optimize their IT costs in economically difficult times, as predicted for CY 2016.

2. Moving from Physical to Virtual to Dockerization/Containers

In 2015, most of our projects revolved around virtualized environments. The choice of virtualization was mainly because of faster server provisioning, increasing up-time and disaster recovery, and having more isolated application environments. This virtualization trend certainly seems to provide efficiencies and capabilities to businesses which simply are not possible in constrained physical setups. Going beyond this, however, we had some challenges in spawning multiple VMs on same physical hardware as a result of resource duplication, overheads at VM level. Containers or dockerization looks promising in such situation as the technology is certainly going to help reduce these overheads by allowing virtual instances to share single host operating system repeatedly.

3.  Challenges with new evolving data types and integrating various data sources

As IT infrastructures are growing in silos, business have invested in various data sources and technologies. Moreover, as customer interaction points are increasing with use of more social media, the nature of data sources, and data types are evolving rapidly. Businesses, though sitting on huge piles of data, are finding it difficult to integrate all these data sources and consume them intelligently to make business sense. This is popularly now called as Big Data problem. In the coming years, businesses will take up more projects in the areas of consolidation of data sources, data integration, and data lake as a first step to get started with their Big Data journey.

4. Balancing legacy systems with open source based systems

As we are seeing open source is not optional choice, but has become a mandatory thing for all major organisations including Big-Medium-Small, Banking-Finance-Insurance-Retail-Government-Telecom etc. The challenge being, some legacy systems customers cannot simply thrash off and migrate them to open source due to various reasons like vendor support, operational issues, lock-in with subsystems etc. Businesses are now looking to strike the right balance between legacy applications and for that, they would need consulting partners like Ashnik to advise them in finding that sweet spot, finding the right workloads to migrate to open source with minimal switching costs.
As we gear up for 2016, or Chinese year of Monkey, we need to be nimble and innovative as the symbol represents to tackle the challenges in market, pick up these trends and convert the challenges into opportunities.

– Kaustubh Patwardhan, Director I Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, Ashnik


Kaustubh (KP) is the Head of Business Development and Strategy at Ashnik. His role comprises of heading Strategic Partnerships, Channels Management and Business Development for ASEAN. With his expansive experience in IT, he plays a pivotal role in strategic initiatives undertaken by Ashnik. Apart from his usual responsibilities at Ashnik, he is passionate about photography, cricket and other sports. He is also an enthusiastic participant in poetic circles and plays.



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