IT Department for non-IT Companies
Recently, I have joined a retailing company as a CTO of the company. These types of companies do not accept the idea of huge expenses of IT and usually, they do not imagine IT costs a lot of time and money. They want everything done well with no time or money.
Solutions of this dilemma
- We can buy a solution from the off-the-shelf and customize it based on business requirements.
- We can develop our own solution based on business requirements.
- We can get an open-source solution and customize it based on business requirements.
Buy an off-the-shelf solution
This solution looks for a lot of people costly and unaffordable, but I think a lot of times this will be a better solution for your company.
Benefits:
- Stable software.
- Tested software.
- Small-time to start.
Drawbacks:
- Cost a lot of money.
- You will pay monthly or annually.
- Hard to find developers to customize.
- Their code is closed so you have limitations in customization and bugs fixing.
- You can not always find a solution to fit your company’s needs.
If your company wants a solid and stable system with a guarantee everything works just fine and they can pay the bills, this is a good choice for you.
Develop a solution
Develop a solution one of the most chosen solutions by developers, but even with all of the flexibilities you have still had a wide number of drawbacks
Benefits:
- Flexibility
- Open for any modifications
Drawbacks:
- Needs a lot of time for the first release ready to run.
- Needs a lot of time to be stable.
- Needs to be careful about choosing the right technology stack.
- May have bugs
- Human resources needed for management, development, and quality assurance, always comes with issues.
- And after all, creating a well developed and tested software cost a lot of money.
Take open source as a solution
This is a tricky solution, for the first look you think it is similar to buy a solution, but without payment, welcome my friend to a naive community thinks ” open source is a free ready to go world”.
To me as a person in between the business world and the IT world, I can tell you this is a totally wrong perspective of the open-source world.
Open source as other things in this life needs money to sustain and move award. That means in a simple way there is a whole business model behind this community.
To know more about this business model let us think why people in open source business:
Developers:
- who want to contribute to some projects to put that on their profile.
- who already using this project in their own software and they want to keep up to date and need to solve some issues.
- Who wants a job based on their experience in open-source software.
Companies:
- which is using this software internally.
- which wants to enhance their software quality.
Community:
- which is trying to help those companies to use open-source software by offering support, different edition, and additional features.
- which is trying to help those companies to enhance their software quality by offering management for the software lifecycle.
Based on the above developers, companies, and communities it is clear that this relationship is a win-win relationship.
So if you are an open-source community, How they make a living?
- Support their software.
- Train their software.
- Sponsor new features.
- Freemium: two different versions one for the community and another one for professionals.
- Cloud solutions.
- Manage software for other companies.
- Take donations from other companies.
- etc…
“But the devil is in the detail”. In the next article, I will share my experience on how to get the most benefits of this open-source community, So stay tuned.
About Me
I’m Alaa Alsalehi a professional backend & mobile developer. I am a Cheif technology officer of Pet Oasis company one of the lead company in the pet business in Saudi Arabia. I have a food recipe content startup with more than a quarter of a million monthly active users.
