Open source software in the early days got lapped up by the independent developer community and technology startups. Large and Medium enterprises were a little slow to adopt it and understandably so. There were apprehensions on stability, support, security and performance; they just felt comfortable and safer with the trusted, tested and tried proprietary model. Over a period of time large enterprises too have embraced open source, most of them took steady steps beginning with infrastructural elements such as Operating System (Linux) followed by Database (MySQL) and several of them went down the LAMP path (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python). The next phase of evolution resulted in several products and application areas such as in Business Intelligence, Portals, Content Management and just about any domain that proprietary products operated in.

The emergence of the LAMP stack, J2EE and several products that were built off of those platforms provided a sense of independence in that integration with proprietary systems (which could be a nightmare) was not essential.

A couple of factors that make Open source a good choice:

Cost – Open source carries a cheaper price tag than proprietary software in most cases. There are free and close to free software but that doesn’t really work out for most enterprise needs. Nothing comes free in this world, if it does, there is a lot of baggage. The commercial model for open source software works in different ways but most of them either offer free software with paid support or a paid enterprise edition vis-à-vis the community edition.

Independence – Customers were earlier tethered to proprietary vendor environments whose products would not talk to each other and subject to dictates of the vendors. Open source offers freedom from vendor lock-in and a great deal of interoperability.

As to the future, open source will continue to co-exist with proprietary software but it is hard to imagine that it would dislodge proprietary software, it will be a choice and an effective alternative in some cases. Communities can thrive but they need commercial Oxygen as well, therefore commercial software can do certain things better ofcourse at a differential cost, but remember though that TCO matters more than direct costs alone.

The Open Source movement is apparent and has gained ground; altruism, common good and the not-for-profit motive are driving factors. The challenge is in its sustainability in some form or the other, so far it has fared very well indeed! It is in the hands of enterprises to have an open mind for open source…. pick the right choices, products, tools, in combination thereof with proprietary technologies and benefit from it.

COBOL still has its forte thanks to legacy applications and IBM. C/C++ has always retained its stronghold – engineering and embedded systems.

On the web front, which has seen enormous applications and innovation, a few languages stand out in terms of popularity – Java, Microsoft .Net (C#/VB.net), PHP, Ruby (on Rails).

How does one decide which language to use? A lot of factors come into play, some of the key ones being:

• Legacy
• Cost – development, tools, products
• Community – popularity, size of user base, developer base
• Support – product vendors, user groups, proprietary/open source
• Development – speed, simplicity, ease
• Performance
• Platform – Enterprise, Internet, Mobile, Device etc..
• Application type – Content, Transactional, Collaboration….

If you are an established enterprise, a lot of times this is dictated by existing environment, if you are an IBM/Sun/Oracle shop you are probably going the Java/J2EE way. Most large enterprises have chosen to go the J2EE route mainly because of its non-proprietary nature, the support from several vendors and its first mover advantage as a robust enterprise platform for the web. If you have been a Microsoft factory, the choice is obvious. Microsoft does particularly well with mid sized companies and in several non-US markets. PHP and Ruby seem to be going head-on and competing in similar segments. Startups and newer companies do not have legacy overheads and hence are free to choose any platform. Also when the hunt is for the best fit COTS product or solution rather than a bespoke application, programming language becomes secondary and more a consequence than choice.

In summary, the field has narrowed down to a few languages, each of which has its niche and application areas. The consumer now has some stable choices to pick from, it is a good time and setting to be in!

Not so fast! From being the only one to one of the options and now to one of the many options, the PC is no longer in its preeminent position. Agreed that there are legitimate contenders such as the Smartphone, Tablet PC, Netbook, Smartbook and more. It is important to draw the distinction here that Desktops and conventional laptops fall in the same category of heavyweights, granted though that the key difference between them being mobility, essentially what we are comparing here is heavy against light. Most recently the netbooks seem to be taking away the last bastion of the PCs in terms of screen size and keyboard.

Apart from the hardware perspective, the growth of several new technologies has contributed to this state – the Web, Browsers, Cloud computing, delivery of Apps in the SaaS model.

What does all of these options mean for the Application developer……well as if the several browsers were not enough, this adds more complexity to design for different screen sizes, code for different operating systems and device constraints. Write once, run anywhere is not so easy!

But the PC will survive for quite a while morphing itself into various forms. From the consumer focus that led to billions of PCs, one in almost every affordable household and the birth of the giant called Dell, it will now transform into an application and utility focused tool with a defined target audience. Where computing power is crucial, the PC will still reign supreme! Engineering, Publishing, Research, Multimedia are all industries that need rich client side computing and they are not going to leave the PC anytime soon!

The advent of Content Management Systems (CMS) which later evolved into ECM or Enterprise Content Management has added a whole new element to Enterprise Software. It is one of the hot spots these days and justifiably so due to the impact it has on enterprise information. In this information age, if 1.0 saw the arrival of Google and search engines that could search and display structured and unstructured data, the next step in evolution was CMS that could organize, store, deliver, manage and report on different types of content.

Digital content can be of several types, categorized at a high level into Web, Documents and Images. Early days CMS products focused on storing web content into databases, providing templates for display as web pages and enabling workflow for publishing such content. While the basics of any CMS or ECM system still remain the same, there are additional types of content such as emails, Records and dimensions such as Collaboration, Taxonomy, multiple Repositories, tight integration with business productivity applications (such as MS Office) that have come into play.

Document Imaging which was earlier a distinct industry segment is increasingly being integrated into the ECM space as Enterprise Content Management itself has become a more important and larger part of Information Lifecycle Management. Documents are usually scanned and in some cases converted to text by OCR.

In the nascent stages of Content Management, CMS vendors made products and solutions way too costly, complex and needed too much customization to be of use, as a result the value proposition was not justifiable. The industry has matured now, ECM products are highly affordable, easy to implement and most features are readily available out-of-the box. Solutions are a lot more standardized, flexible and interoperable. Part of this could also be attributed to the fact that several key components such as workflow, search etc.. are being offered through specialty product engines bundled into the end product rather than being developed by the ECM vendors themselves.

The ECM market has several players, some of the more popular ones being Interwoven, Vignette/OpenText, Documentum, Filenet, Sharepoint, Alfresco. It is important also to realize that several vendors provide either Web content management or Document content management but not both, there are some excellent products though in either category.

Like in every other enterprise software, there are proprietary, open source and commercial open source providers in the ECM market too. As to choice of a CMS, factors such as Features, Technology, Cost and Support play a vital part in the determination. From the Technology perspective, customers watch out for the underlying programming language, support for Operating systems, Web servers, Application servers and Databases. Most Content Management products these days are written in Java, PHP or .Net.