Data Integration Blog

With the financial crisis, mass lay-offs and vanishing resources, companies get only more demanding. We emphasize reliability and get only more irritated if things are not neat, simple and under control.

Software is the last thing you want to sweat about in this situation. So when your business depends on commercial software and it lets you down, things can really suck.

It’s interesting to watch how financial crisis makes a lot of companies previously skeptical of open source and software as a service turn to these two and try to get the most of them.

Open source looks appealing because it’s free for the most part and, you literally have a 24/7 support from a community of extremely committed developers.

SaaS is good because most of the work is already done for you, and subscription-based payment plans tend to be tempting.

Let’s go further though, to the pre-built solutions. These are even better, as they rid you of all manual coding and let anyone (Literally. Anyone.) on the staff “watch and relax”, making minimum to no effort at all.

Open source is free and out there available to everyone. You’re not making a long-term financial commitment by trying it. Neither are you sweating it while getting your bearings in a new pre-built technology. Work’s done for you. So, it’s like there’s a bonus that comes with a pie: not only are you saving money, you’re saving loads of time and increasing the overall efficiency.

Pre-built open source, the new green (pink, red… whatever), is it?

Software as a Service…a concept that seems so attractive and luring. Yet you can’t but ignore how some companies are constantly criticizing it, telling the “horror stories” of how “friends of their friends” wasted time and resources depending on their SaaS providers, how it’s totally unreliable to let your customer data out and let some outsider be in control of it.

Rumours and fears like that don’t come out of nowhere, obviously. Companies, especially small and mid-sized businesses, get very touchy when it comes to their data and security for a reason. And the reason is…being way too conservative.

In fact the ones that complain the most are usually the ones that realize the least just how vulnerable their data/software is inside their own company. Look at the real picture. With SaaS you’re not just letting out-of-house players be in control of your precious resources, but rather letting the pros protect, even fix it.

There’s nothing wrong with not knowing how EVERYTHING works and how to fix EVERYTHING. There are enough SaaS services to take a large chunk of your “everything” off of your shoulders. =) Then you’ll be able to focus on your internal assets and get double the work done with the same effort.

Let me list a few more benefits of having SaaS in your life:

* increased implementation speed;
* increased flexibility and usability;
* reduced dependence on IT services,
* access fom anywhere
* costs usually smaller than software license costs
* superior protection and security of your data

With that said…being conservative sure helps…sometimes… but as my coach used to say, “there's nothing wrong with being PROgressive”.