Open source development throughout the years

Open source software is a continuous rivalry of new ideas where users decide which solutions fit best and survive in the long run. These solutions enable businesses to adapt fast and gain competitive advantages. This has matured open source software into a reliable and ever accelerating driver of digital tranformation. Improving opportunities for smaller and midsize companies just as wells as for large enterprises.

For more than 20 years, since Linux gained the support and backing of huge IT suppliers like IBM, Google and Amazon, the spread of open source software has been game changing for everything from application development to cloud to high-performance computing and much more.

In its pursuit to grow its cloud operations, in October last year, IBM announced it will acquire open source vendor Red Hat, one of the most successful and strongest open source companies of the world, for $34 billion. Rumors are swirling that Google might be planning a counteroffer.

With that in mind, here’s my list of open source technologies that will help grow your business, services and revenue in 2019 and beyond.

6. Container orchestration

Containers are a win for companies moving to the cloud because they allow applications and other code run consistently in any environment, whether it is within the companies own private cloud, a public cloud or a hybrid model. It can save you IT infrastructure costs because containers create much higher application density then any traditional machine virtualization. Furthermore it allows developers and infrasturcture engineers (DevOps) to work more closely together and speed up development of your business strategy.

Different open source communities developed the containerization technologies that have become de facto market standards such as LXC, Virtuozo and Docker. You can use open source orchestration tooling such as Kubernetes, OpenShift or OpenStack to automate deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts.

5. Machine Learning

Machine learning is a technology that isn’t new, but has still much ground left to gain. Open source machine learning platforms, such as Google Cloud Machine Learning, TensorFlow, Apache PredictionIO and Microsoft Distributed Machine Learning Kit, allow users to create and develop training and prediction models that help machines teach themselves how perform new tasks, without having to be specifically programmed.

With Machine Learning you can for example target your audience more efficiently for marketing purposes or store your content most efficiently by importance topicality in the cloud by analysing customers and predicting their buying behavior.

4. Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things sure has been taking its time to arrive on the consumer and business scenes. The development of IoT open source applications and products continues today, and more open source solutions are beginning to shine like ThingsBoard, Mainflux and Thinger.

With IoT you can for example track your assets, reduce overhead, prevent machine failures and maintenance issues. On larger scales, When up to scale, for all these examples a business case can be written, that eventually will save companies precious time and money.

3. Big Data analytics

For years, large enterprises have been taking advantage of open source big data analytics tools such as Apache Hadoop and Cassandra Grid Gain to analyze and manage their huge data sets. But today, even smaller businesses can look at such tools to help them extract business insights. That’s where in 2019 and beyond, companies should begin to help drive the expansion of this market.

With Big Data analytics you can for example understand your customers even better to improve your product and upsell upgrades and improvements.

2. Open source cloud

Open source cloud platforms combine reliable pools of compute, storage and network resources so they can be managed through a data center dashboard to grow and digitize your business and makes it easier to adopt the other innovations such as the other open source projects mentioned in this blog.

As companies look at public cloud technologies like Azure, Amazon or Google Cloud they often forget that they can make use of the same functionality, fully managed in their own datacenter for a fraction of the costs of the public cloud, without spending precious recources and time to rollout and maintain the infrastructure.

1. Hybridization of operating systems

Companies, even the ones running all-Windows shops, inevitably have some Linux from Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu or others running inside their IT systems. In the world of open source possibilities always look at expanding the possibilities and functionalities for these systems. Traditional Linux distros are every bit as valid and valuable as mainstream operating systems, at least in the data center.

Be creative

In the big scheme of things, there are literally thousands of open source projects that are being used in business IT systems of all sizes. That’s where I think companies can create winning business value.

If you are creative enough, you can find an open source project that fits the needs of your organization. But even more: you will see new possibilities you have never thought of before.