Saying No To Big Software

November 4, 2009 from Forbes – “The recession has cast a bright light on the tactics used by Big Software companies to lock in their customers through multi-year license agreements. In these agreements, annual fees go up, but can almost never be reduced--even if the customer's business has downsized…

Sims replaced proprietary software with open-source technologies across the company's IT infrastructure with the deployments of the SuSe Linux operating system, the Ingres open-source database, and the Hobbit open-source monitoring tool to monitor the health of Save Mart's servers, applications and networks...”

180 View – The answer in the article is open source. Open source may not be the answer for all types of software especially when a lot of support is required and resources are not easily available. But it should put pressure on software developers to ease up on the maintenance costs. Obviously SAP and Oracle don’t feel threatened by open source.