Open Source as a Launch Pad for Scaling

Every industry is going digital in its own unique way to reach out to more customers and are now dealing with enormous transaction and data volumes. Distribution channels have become more pervasive and the number of mobile devices has grown several folds. They need to grow from a few hundred transactions to several millions per second. To meet the scaling needs without linear investments in infrastructure and applications, enterprises need to look at adopting open source platforms as it presents a reliable, cost-effective and competitive path to massive scale.

An early 2015 study called The Open Source Era, published by Oxford Economics and Wipro, shows that open source software is being viewed as a critical supporter of mobility, middleware and content management among few others. Open source can be used to accelerate the scaling ambitions of enterprises over a number of vectors that come into play. There are many areas that enterprises must examine to handle large-scale transactions and ensure that open source enables innovation and scale.

The top five areas that can be highlighted for a scalable enterprise are:

Web: The Web is where enterprises have a majority of their conversationswith their end-users. Enterprises that have a large number of transactions to handle are responding to users with open source NodeJS and AngularJS applications to keep pace with growing traffic.

Middleware:Most enterprises have IT estates that are complex, with middleware responsible for connecting heterogeneous systems. These systems today exchange thousands of messages every second and can be under severe stress. Opensource platforms for middleware ease these stress with minimal resource consumption

Data:Databases play a critical role in any enterprise and have traditionally been highly structured. But today, the volume, velocity and variety of data are such that a new breed of database is needed.  Opensource based NoSQL platforms offers an amazing alternate to handle large volume of data.Cloud, PaaS and IaaS:With increasing pressure to scale IT infrastructure in real-time, what enterprises need is a cloud-based auto scaling solution.Enterprises are leaning heavily on Platform as a Service (PaaS) to enable flexible and elastic scaling. There are several open source PaaS options to choose from. These are especially attractive when they work with OpenStack or other Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment.

Analytics:It is the large volume of real-time data that is helping enterprisesimprove response times and ensure that customer expectations are met. But, along with the data, it is equally important to have real-time analytics that provide insights to act on. For example, real-time analytics can be used to detect fraud in the growing number of online transactions; assist in quickly onboarding new customers; examine risksposed by banking and insurance customers; provide intelligence to manufacturing that is inundated with data from the IoT; scrutinize surveillance and security video information to flag threats; enhance safety in mining operations, etc. Opensource based analytics solutions helps to realize these real time analysis needs.

Open source is increasingly proving to be the core strategy for a number of enterprises gearing up for the digital era. It gives them cost-effective access to cutting-edge technologies that allow them to scale end-to-end, to freely experiment with the assurance of support from the vast number of open source communities and large organizations. It also helps in building innovative applications that gives them a competitive advantage. Enterprises that embrace open source will be bound for the forefront of the digital era and will lead innovation.

Prime Hype DF 2016 EP