Open source won't bring about world peace, but it will save companies a lot of money along the way. Cignex, one of Alfresco's partners and a leader in open source content management, recently implemented a Plone-based CMS for the University of North Carolina, and created an open source convert at the same time.
Take the University of North Carolina's School of Medicine. It needed a solid CMS to manage course materials. It tapped Cignex, which helped it evaluate a few solutions (Plone, OpenCMS, Bricolage, etc.), eventually settling on Plone. It ended up saving a boatload on licensing fees, but also got a better fit for its needs.
As UNC recognized, customization is often standard. I would bet that in the enterprise, it makes more sense to start with open source (which encourages modification to tailor to one's needs) than to start with a bloated proprietary product that is not intended to be modified. Fit for purpose. Indeed, UNC found that buying a license to software that you don't actually want (because what you want is a customized version of that software) is a bad idea:
Several content management applications, both open and proprietary, have been created for undergraduate-level institutions. The SOM [School of Medicine] had special requirements. All first- and second-year students attend the same courses at the same time. Each course typically is taught by a number of different professors and clinicians, rather than one instructor. According to Hitlin, if customization was going to be a large part of the project, the CMS committee reasoned, why not go with an open-source version so that, at least, the code would be free? That way, the SOM could devote its limited resources to development and implementation.One of the funny things in the implementation is that the University needed to run on expensive hardware, despite it not running as well and much more expensively:"[The SOM] did look at commercial providers but felt that these commercial systems weren't geared toward [a] graduate-level school. They realized they would have to do a custom solution no matter what," Thangavelu said. Given that, an open application seemed a very sound choice.
That's when the project ran smack into a major hardware problem. In the test environment, the application ran on an inexpensive Linux blade server and performed well, according to Hitlin and Thangavelu. But the project team got an unpleasant surprise when it installed the application on one of the SOM's Sun Microsystems' Solaris SPARC boxes.Great work, Cignex!"As soon as we installed the application locally, we saw significant latency—10 seconds to load a page, where it had been 1 second in the development environment. It turned out the SPARC hardware doesn't run Python efficiently," Hitlin said.
Cignex advised the SOM to run the open Plone application on inexpensive Linux boxes, which would run a reasonable $2,000 to $3,000 each. But, according to Hitlin, the SOM's system support group was accustomed to supporting the Sun Solaris architecture and was reluctant to add a new platform to the mix.
Posted by Matt Asay on September 13, 2006 12:20 AM
