Today, IT takes center stage in an organization's business model. They consist of interrelated architectural, co-operational and financial arrangements designed and developed to achieve its strategic goals and objectives. The products and/or services the organization offers or will offer are based on the arrangements that are built on the IT infrastructure. In this slide deck, we discuss the economic value of open source middleware for achieving the objectives in an enterprise.

1. Chief Engineering & Delivery Officer - WSO2
The Role of Open Source and
Community in an Enterprise
Samisa Abeysinghe

2. Why use Open Source?
•Build an ecosystem around products and
services
•Grow your user communities
•Cost, quality and security advantages…
•Process, management and business lessons

3. Open Communication
3

4. Dynamic Decision Making
Structure
4

5. Meritocracy
5

6. Release Early – Release Often
6

7. Users are Part of the Project
Team
7

8. • Not that it is cheap or free
• The culture & the community matters
Open Source Benefits
8

9. Open Source as Engineering Process
•Collaboration
•Technology superiority
•Sharing and reuse
•Feedback Cycles
•Evolution
•Quality

10. Open Source for Delivering Customer Value
•Adoption
•Transparency
•Legal and procurement
•Time vs money tradeoffs

11. IT Solutions
Services
Software
Hardware
•What have you got to
pay for?
•OSS drives down
software costs
–Lower overall project
cost

12. Project Economics with OSS

13. Value Proposition
•Pay for software or value added partnerships
•How can you de-risk
–The project
–The solution
–The deployment

14. Open Source as a Recruiting Vehicle
•Attracts and retains top talent
•Widely used in educational institutions and
research projects
•Extends community beyond corporate
boundaries

15. Contribute and Influence
Committers
Contri
butors
Users Benefits
• Faster fixes
• Strategy alignment
• Employee
attractiveness
• Visibility in the
community

16. Conclusion
•OSS allows you to think beyond software
•Community, collaboration, communication
•Decision making
•Focus on solutions
•Collaborate and influence

17. wso2.com
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