Opensville meets the real world

You can think of open source as a utopian "town" called Opensville, somewhere near the community of Proprietary. People like to visit Opensville, yet no one wants to live there. Why? Because no one pays to keep the city running.

So how do you get the best of both communities -- the cost-saving value of open solutions combined with the solid advantages of centralized, proprietary software to manage the IT infrastructure? You can deploy an integrated system of proprietary solutions that manage the infrastructure based on best practices from the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and leverage open source technology where appropriate.

Traditional software and open source technology operate in two very different worlds. Open source has a decentralized model of development that encompasses differing agendas, approaches and priorities. Traditional software provides a more closed, centralized model. Yet they can come together to benefit your organization.

For IT, open source is a way to improve service and reduce costs without the expense. The lower acquisition costs, fast development cycle, continuing enhancements and quick fixes to problems make open source attractive. In fact, a leading industry analyst predicts that within a few years about 80% of all commercial software will include elements of open source technology.

As open source converges with best-practices frameworks such as ITIL and Business Service Management (BSM) solutions, IT professionals need an effective service management strategy to bring together the components. Although there are already open source service management tools, these solutions are not as mature as other open source software. The ecosystem consists primarily of users, rather than developers. While tens of thousands of open source projects have been launched in the service management arena, 60% are considered inactive and 70% are authored, managed and supported by only one person.

Viable open source monitoring, discovery and software provisioning solutions exist, but they have significant shortcomings. They do not address key areas of ITIL service management, such as service level and incident management. And none of them addresses all the areas that together provide the ability to achieve end-to-end service management.

A realistic look at open source limitations

IT environments are typically heterogeneous, combining open source and proprietary platforms, servers and applications. Currently, open source solutions do not cover mainframes and other important infrastructure components, so they do not fully support these mixed environments. IT organizations cannot adopt a totally open source approach to service management until open solutions offer strong heterogeneous platform support -- which will not likely happen in the foreseeable future.

Limited ITIL support is another concern. Only a few open source service management solutions support ITIL, and even fewer integrate with a configuration management database (CMDB), a fundamental component of the configuration management system (CMS) recommended in ITIL V3. The CMDB maintains important information that helps IT understand how the components of the IT environment relate to each other and to the services IT provides to the business.